


In the Light Between the Lines

by ArtemisPendragon (DestinyWolfe)



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Afterlife, Alternate Reality, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Epic Battles, Epic Friendship, Heroes & Heroines, Infinity Gauntlet, Infinity Gems, Infinity War spoilers, Multi, My whacked-out take on Avengers 4, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Saving the World, So much angst, Soulmates, Time Travel, True Love, altering reality, but I love them so I'm gonna do it anyway, i don't know how to write these characters, this is gonna be a hot mess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-05-01 01:08:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14509188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestinyWolfe/pseuds/ArtemisPendragon
Summary: Tony and Nebula are stranded on an alien planet with no viable means of escape. In order to get back to Earth before running out of resources, they must build a new ship from a total wreck (which is also an apt description of Tony's mental state at the moment) and find some way to track down and defeat Thanos once and for all.Back on Earth, Shuri makes a discovery. It seems that the Infinity Gauntlet has destroyed more than just lifeforms. With two planets in the Solar System unaccounted for and the possibility of accelerated heat death on a universal scale, time is not on anyone's side. Meanwhile, Steve, Rhodey, and Natasha struggle to cope with their personal losses while coming up with a plan.In the dimly-lit and ever-shifting limbo dimension ruled by the Soul Stone, Gamora, T'Challa, both Peters, Sam, Bucky, Wanda, and everyone else killed by or for the Infinity Stones must fight their way across a foreboding plain of existence to reach a portal to Earth opened by Loki during his last confrontation with Thanos. Which, of course, was Loki's plan all along.





	1. Orbital Anomalies

**Author's Note:**

> DISCLAIMER: I don't own these characters. If I did, they'd still be alive. That having been said, this story contains HUGE SPOILERS for Infinity War Part 1! I'm talking spoilers so big they could almost fill all the plot holes this story will contain. *ahem* 
> 
> THAT having been said, as of now I've only seen IW once (boo!), and I suck at writing 80% of these characters (and am probably not much better at writing the other 20%) so I apologize in advance if I fuck up everything and remember nothing. Feel free to correct my blatant disregard for continuity if you want! Anyway, if even one person enjoys reading this absolute dumpster fire of a fic, then my work here is done. 
> 
> As always, big love to my Marvel family! I'll see y'all in therapy.

**Chapter One**

**Orbital Anomalies**

Of all the shitty situations, being stranded on an alien planet in some unknown sector of space with no suit, a broken ship, and the bone-deep panic that comes with watching your friends and teammates turn to ash in front of you was probably the shittiest. In the moments before realizing that Nebula had also survived, Tony was convinced he was utterly alone. Kneeling on the dead, burnt rocks of a foreign land, every particle in his body on fire with grief, he closed his eyes and waited to dissolve. 

Nearby, Nebula stood staring out over the wasteland. She’d already concluded that she had survived the culling. As soon as the others began to fade, she knew what it meant. Thanos had won. The Infinity Stones had been assembled, and now, against the invincible power that the Mad Titan wielded, there could be no victory. 

And yet somehow, she had survived. 

Nebula clenched her fists around air. She inhaled slowly. She started down the side of the rocky incline, toward the ruined, sun-baked city that had once been a thriving civilization. Thanos had won, but that could be undone. She was stranded, but she was not yet dead. Titan was a dead planet, but perhaps some of its technology had survived. If she wanted to live long enough to face Thanos again—and she did; in fact, it was the only thing keeping her going—then she’d need resources and a working ship. 

Holding her head high, she made for the dead city.

Tony heard the gentle fall of rocks as Nebula started down the hill. He looked up, but remained kneeling, his hands covered in his own blood and Peter’s ashes. His face felt wet. Shaking, he pressed his hands hard against his eyes. His palms came away slick with tears. The sight of bloodstains mixed with dust and tears broke something inside him. The grief and panic disappeared. A hole opened in his chest, hollow and hungry, and swallowed every shred of feeling in one gulp. 

Standing up, Tony wiped his hands viciously on his ruined shirt. There was a tear in it where Thanos had stabbed him. With shaking fingers, he lifted the material and ran his fingers over the site of the wound. It had all but disappeared. He knew that he should feel scared then, or relieved, or even disappointed. But he felt nothing at all.

“Thanos will be back,” Nebula called from the bottom of the hill. She had reached the edge of the city. Unkempt, chipped, and crooked stairs led to what had once been a thriving city square. “Now that he has unlimited power, who knows what he’ll do.”

Tony didn’t reply. He stood on the crest of the hill, staring out over the dead surface of Titan, past the ruined city toward the far horizon.

Nebula left Tony alone. She knew what he was feeling. That emptiness, that hopelessness that she’d felt during years of suffering at Thanos’s hands, the hollow echoing pain when she’d learned of Gamora’s fate. But instead of falling into the void, instead of giving in to despair, she’d embraced the emptiness. Over time, she had built it up around herself: an impenetrable armor of carefully-cultivated recklessness. Thanos would pay for what he’d done. He’d crafted her into a weapon, torn her apart and rebuilt her a thousand times. Didn’t he know what he had made? 

Well, she thought bitterly as she stepped through rubble and the dust of old bones, he would soon find out.

. . . . . .

“Steve.” Natasha reached down and touched Steve’s hand. A gentle brush of fingers, telling him she was there. “It’s getting dark. We should go inside.”

Steve stared out across the bloodstained field. The grass was thick with blood and the bodies of the fallen. Well, not _all_ the fallen. Not the ones who had disappeared, smoke rising and drifting away into nothing…

“ _Rogers_ ,” said Natasha, moving around to block his view of the carnage. “I’m serious. This isn’t healthy. It’s been 28 hours. If we want to fix this, we’re gonna need a plan.”

Steve looked down. He met her gaze for a moment, but the intensity was too much. Swallowing hard, he looked away, off over the sweeping grasslands toward the glittering city of Birnin Zana. His hand rose to his neck, touching the two tiny vials hanging against his chest, resting in the absence of a star. Glass cylinders full of ashes. All that was left now of the best and bravest men Steve had ever known. His fingers closed around the vials, holding them so tight he was afraid they might crack.

Colonel Rhodes, who had come with Natasha to check on him, stood a few feet away, watching the sunset. Red and gold lined the horizon. A great upward sweep of warmth fading to navy blue. “She’s right,” Rhodes said. His voice was low, strong. Determined. “It’s no use standing around doing nothing. The universe won’t save itself, that’s for damn sure.”

Natasha put a hand over Steve’s, resting against his chest. “Look at me, Rogers,” she said, and despite his reluctance, he obeyed. Her eyes were dark and stormy: lightning reflecting off seafoam crests. “We _will_ get them back. And that _is_ for damn sure,” she added, with a glance at Rhodes. She half-smiled, and Rhodes half-smiled back.

Steve exhaled slowly. There was a pit in his chest, a hole where his heart should be. It felt like he’d swallowed a black hole. Everything he was, everything he cared about spiraling down, down, fading to dust and smoke. _Why am I here,_ he thought. _Why am I still here?_

It was like Natasha had read his mind. “We need you, Steve,” she said. “Bucky needs you. Sam needs you. And, although I’m sure you’re tired of hearing this, the world needs you.” She cocked an eyebrow and tilted her head to one side. The half-smile was back. “So yeah, it’s not an ideal situation. But we’ll handle it. We always do.”

Steve looked at her. Really looked. And for the first time since the battle began, it struck him that she was only human, no serum, no radiation, no super suit. Just Natasha Romanoff, fighting because it was the right thing to do. Because she cared.

“Alright,” he said with the last of his breath. He inhaled deeply, savoring the smell of drying blood and sun-baked, trampled grass. “Alright.” 

In silence, the three Avengers made their slow but steady way back across the battlefield toward Wakanda’s Golden City, silhouettes against a dusky, blood-red sky.

. . . . . .

“I’m telling you,” Shuri said, spreading her hands and causing the glowing blue outline of a diagnostics screen to appear midair, “these readings are legit.”

Bruce Banner frowned. He sat heavily on the edge of the nearest desk. Shuri’s lab had been overturned by Thanos’s soldiers; it wasn’t like he was going to damage anything that hadn’t already been broken. “But it’s impossible,” he heard himself say, even though it wasn’t. At this point, was anything impossible? Probably not.

Shuri shook her head. She cast the diagnostics screen into the center of the room, magnifying it to five times its size. Ever since the final battle and Thanos’s victory, she’d been working non-stop to establish exactly how much damage the Mad Titan had caused. Working was the only way to distract herself from the raw, aching pain of losing her brother and mother, and thousands of her fellow Wakandans. Forcing her hands not to shake, she used one finger to zoom in on three particularly important numbers at the corner of the diagram. “These readings are off,” she said, “but they’re not _inaccurate._ ” She pointed to the first number. “This is the average length of Earth’s annual orbit based on data collected two months ago.” She moved down to the second number. “This is the length of Earth’s orbit right after the battle, sometime yesterday afternoon.” She pointed to the most recent number. “And _this_ is Earth’s orbit right now.” She turned to Bruce with an expectant look on her face. “See what I’m saying?”

Bruce leaned in for a better look. “The readings are increasing,” he commented.

Shuri raised one eyebrow. “Exactly. And what’s that mean to you?”

“Nothing.” He shrugged. “These changes in readings are increases by mere millionths of an AU. It’s probably normal fluctuation in the trajectory of Earth’s orbital path.”

Shuri turned back to the screen. “Using big words doesn’t change reality, Dr. Banner,” she said. “Something’s causing Earth’s orbit to become more elliptical. It’s right there. My data doesn’t lie.”

Bruce ran a hand over his face. He felt the ache behind his eyes growing, tension bringing on a headache the likes of which he hadn’t had in years. He pressed his fingers to his temples and rubbed hard. “Am I right in guessing you have a hypothesis?”

Shuri was silent for a moment. She zoomed the screen back out, then swiped left to reveal a perfect 3-D model of the solar system. Perfect, except for the fact that two planets were missing. “Well,” she said, “at this point it’s more of a theory.”

“Where’s Jupiter?” Bruce asked, frowning. “And Venus?”

“Exactly,” she said. And in that moment, Bruce finally understood. 

  



	2. Into the Void

**Chapter Two**

**Into the Void**

As his body faded around him, dust floating on an unfelt wind, Bucky turned to Steve. He took a step, two, and then his legs gave out. He had seconds before it was over, and somehow, he sensed it. He called out, and Steve turned. For the briefest of moments, their eyes locked. And then Bucky pitched forward into the void.

That final image of Steve’s face, open and confused, the look in his eyes reflecting the building panic in Bucky’s chest, burned itself into Bucky’s brain and stayed stuck long after the rest of the world went dark.

The next sensation Bucky was aware of was a gentle, creeping cold. It slid icy fingers down his spine and over his face. Breath like winter ghosted across his throat. He woke up—if that was even the right word for it—and sat upright. Or at least he tried to. Strangely, his body didn’t respond. His eyes, however, opened. 

If he’d been breathing, the sight before him would’ve taken his breath away.

A plain of endless gray stretched toward a pencil-line horizon. The sky was a dull red-orange, cloudless and devoid of stars. Bucky’s first thought was that this must be it felt like to be a bug caught under a plastic cup. Disoriented, he looked around. He was lying spread-eagle on the oddly flat, textureless ground. He ran the fingers of his new arm (the metal one, its fingertips as sensitive as a cat’s whiskers) over the strange surface and was astonished by its incredible smoothness. 

With great effort, he sat up. Feeling returned to his body, a rush of sensation from the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet. The clearer his thoughts, the more real he felt. Pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes, he steeled himself to face the vast, unending reality of what had happened. _I’m dead._ He repeated the words in his head, over and over. Rolling them around, testing them out. Eventually he concluded that being dead wasn’t a huge shock. The real miracle was that he’d managed to stay alive so long. _But if I’m dead,_ he thought, _then where am I?_

He opened his eyes again. Pushing himself to his feet, he stood stock-still, turning in every direction until he was sure it all looked the same. Then he started walking. He had no idea why, or where he was going. Just that he was. After all, he’d get nowhere standing around forever. 

He made it half a mile (in reality, if it even was reality, he had no idea how or if distance was measured in this place, so he figured miles would do) before anything remotely interesting happened. And then, half a mile in, there was a flash of lightning in the far distance. Well, not quite lightning, because it spread and filled the entire sky. A brilliant flash of green that lasted half a second, maybe less, and then faded. 

Bucky stopped. He held his breath (not that he needed to breathe, but it was the principle of the thing) and counted the seconds. Sure enough, five beats later a tremendous rolling boom echoed out over the gray plain. Bucky tilted his head back, then turned in a circle. He lowered his head and did it again. No matter where he looked, nothing seemed different or out of place. Try as he might, he couldn’t figure out where the sound had come from, or what had caused the flash of light that had preceded it.

Resigning himself to the situation, Bucky set his shoulders and kept walking. If he was dead, he told himself, then he had an eternity to figure out where he was, and why he was there. No rush. 

But then the mental image of Steve, blonde hair messy and clotted with dirt and blood, blue eyes wide as they met Bucky’s, forced its way into his head. In a moment of heart-rending agony, he realized he didn’t know if Steve had survived. Involuntarily, his fists clenched. He set his jaw and walked faster. Soon, he was running full-tilt, headed for the horizon. 

“I’m coming for you!” he called out into the void. As if Steve—dead, alive, or otherwise—could actually hear him. “I’m telling you right now, Rogers, I refuse to be dead without you.”

The vast, breathless landscape swallowed Bucky’s echo whole.

. . . . .

Several hundred miles away, Stephen Strange, Peter Quill, Drax the Destroyer, and Mantis woke up on the flat gray plain. 

Of the group, Strange was the only one unaffected and unsurprised by their surroundings. He stood up slowly, doing his best to hold on to the careful calm he’d cultivated in his mind just before The Fade. He watched with a neutral, unassuming expression as the others slowly came to their senses. This place was familiar to him. Of the fourteen million possible futures he’d seen, he’d ended up here in over half of them. Death, to him, was an old friend.

“…this _sucks,_ ” Quill said, finishing the sentence he’d started back on Titan.

“What is this place?” Mantis said after blinking awake, her face open and full of awe. She looked at her hands, wiggled her fingers, and then placed them both beneath her shoulders. In one graceful, flowing movement, she folded into a bridge pose and then flipped herself upright. For a moment, she looked utterly amazed. And then, in a voice filled with unrestrained glee, she said, “I’m not dead!” 

Strange watched, unimpressed and not afraid to show it, as Quill tried to copy Mantis’s graceful maneuver and ended up twisted into an uncomfortable upside-down U. He gave up and fell back, then rolled over and pushed himself to his feet. He straightened his stance and held his head high, as if to say: _Yeah, I totally meant to do that._ But then he winced, grimacing. “Ah, man,” he said. He pressed a hand to his lower back. “I think I just fucked up my spine. Can you even fuck up your spine in the afterlife? I’m just sayin’, but that seems a bit unfair.”

“We’re not dead,” Mantis told him, smiling enthusiastically. “Look!” She wiggled her fingers in front of Quill’s face. “If I were dead, could I do _that?_ ”

Quill frowned. He turned to look at Drax, who was still lying on the ground, staring unblinkingly at the sky as if in some kind of trance. “What about him?” Quill said. “He looks pretty dead.” He looked around, clearly searching for some small, throwable object to chuck at Drax. 

Strange took this as his cue to interfere. He gave his head a tiny shake to recalibrate. As many times as he’d witnessed this outcome, it had never occurred to him just how irritating it would be to be stuck in the afterlife with the newly-deceased Guardians of the Galaxy. At the least, it would take some getting used to. Rolling back his shoulders and taking a deep breath (not out of necessity, but for dramatic effect), he made an announcement. 

“We _are_ dead,” he said, without preamble. There was no point softening the blow. They all knew what had happened, whether they wanted to admit it or not. “This is The Manifest. The Soul Stone’s realm. It’s where you end up when you’re killed by the Infinity Gauntlet.”

Quill snapped to attention at the mention of the Soul Stone. His expression hardened. The grief, fresh and raw, bloomed in his eyes. 

Strange continued. “I know this might be very hard for you all to accept, but—” 

He was cut off by Drax, who sat up as suddenly as if someone had poked him with an electrified rod. He looked around, clearly confused. But when he saw Quill and Mantis, he grinned broadly. “Quill,” he said in a deep, booming voice, “I knew you were lying!”

Mantis smiled just as widely as Drax. She looked at Quill, inquisitive. “Lying about what?” she asked.

Drax pointed at Quill as he slowly pushed himself into a crouch. “He told me he can’t die,” Drax announced. He rose to his full (and rather intimidating) height. “You owe me fifty credits.”

“Dude, no way,” said Quill, putting up both hands, palms out, like a buffer between himself and Drax’s accusation. 

Drax frowned. “Why not?”

“One, we’re dead. Two, we agreed drunk bets don’t count. Three, four, and five, _we’re dead!_ ”

“We never agreed to that,” said Drax.

Quill threw up his hands. “It’s like talking to a brick wall.”

“Ha!” said Drax. “That makes no sense. Brick walls are inanimate. They can’t talk.”

Quill turned to Mantis with a _can-you-believe-this-shit_ look on his face, and Strange fought the urge to facepalm so hard he’d knock himself into another (hopefully quieter) dimension. But, because the fate of the universe was at stake, he steeled himself and soldiered on. “As I was saying,” he continued, through clenched teeth, “the first time you die can be disconcerting. You lot, however, seem to be doing just fine.” He hoped his words didn’t sound as sarcastic as they were.

Mantis closed her eyes for a moment, head tilted to one side. “This place is empty,” she said, frowning. “There’s no feeling.” 

Strange inclined his head. “Yes,” he said. “That’s because there’s so _much_ feeling. Essentially, the nothingness you feel is due to the blending of an infinitely large, ever-changing mix of emotions that, when combined, cancel each other out.”

“Like when we play all of Quill’s songs over the intercom at once,” Drax said sagely. “Only not as loud.” 

Quill shot Drax a look. “Dude, that was you doing that? That time in the asteroid field? Seriously uncool!”

Mantis smiled. “He thought it was the ship malfunctioning,” she told Drax, who let out a sharp, ecstatic bark of laughter. And then, cheerfully, she added, “We could have _died_!”

Strange stared at her, perplexed by her sunny tone. “Excuse me, but right now we _are_ dead, and the universe as we know it is about to end. Does anyone here care even remotely about that?” This did get their attention (or enough of it, anyway) and he plowed on while he had the chance. “Half the life in the universe is gone. Unfortunately, half of _everything_ in the universe is also disappearing. At a slower rate than the organic lifeforms, but disappearing nonetheless. And when it does, the expansion of the universe will accelerate, planetary systems will fall apart, galaxies will unravel and, eventually, the universe will spread its heat and energy so thin that heat death with occur.”

“Cool,” said Quill. “Good luck with the whole saving-the-universe thing. But if I’m dead, the first thing I’m doing is finding Gamora.” Without further ado, he turned and started walking away across the flat gray expanse.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Strange called after him. A rhetorical question—of all the trillions of souls now trapped in the Soul Stone’s realm, he was among the handful or so who knew how to navigate it. 

Quill ignored him. Mantis and Drax watched him go for a moment, then started after him side-by-side.

With a soul-deep sigh (although, given the fact that Thanos had reduced him to _just_ a soul, technically _any_ sigh would be a soul-deep one), Strange followed them. If he was going to get his plan to work—his only plan, his one-in-fourteen-million chance—he needed Quill. Like it or not, they were going to have to stick together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, just wanna start by saying OH MY GODS THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who left me a comment or kudos on that last chapter! The Marvel family really is the best. Anyway, I got the next chapter up as fast as I could! However, I have to warn you that I wrote 90% of it while waiting for a wasp trapped in my dorm to emerge from hiding so I could chase it out with a broom, and I'm fuckin mortified of wasps, so if it's a bit disjointed or makes no sense, don't blame me, blame the wasp! (also I'm a lazy fuck who doesn't like to edit and has no idea how to write these characters, so suffer.) Thank you again for all the support! I appreciate it more than I can say. :,D


	3. Chance Meetings at the End of the World

**Chapter Three**

**Chance Meetings at the End of the World**

Half a mile away, Peter Parker was trying his best not to have a full-scale panic attack in the middle of the afterlife. He’d woken up on his back, immobile and rigid, and been frozen like that for at least an hour. Overhead, the red-orange sky spread like a suffocating blanket of muted fire. Panic flashed through him, bolt after bolt of adrenaline. Unbidden, the thought came to him that he looked like a dead spider, stuck on its back with its limbs spread awkwardly around it. If he’d been able to, the unexpectedly apt analogy might’ve made him laugh.

It wasn’t until he’d resigned himself to paralysis that the constricting of his muscles released. Instantly, he was on his feet. Shaking, he rose to his full height, scooting his feet apart to brace himself as he took in his surroundings. 

Although he’d been released from whatever trance he’d been in, it took Peter another few minutes to find his voice. Terror sunk long fangs into his throat and held on tight. He tried to steady himself, to avoid falling into the gaping pit of panic opening inside his mind. “Okay,” he said aloud, just to break the deafening silence. “It’s okay, just gotta stay calm.” Closing his eyes, he pressed his hands over his face and counted down from ten. This helped a little until it brought his lack of breathing to his attention. A new wave of crippling anxiety crashed through him, and he sank back down into a crouch, wrapping his arms around his knees.

In the void, there was nothing. Just an endless stretch of gray for as far as he could see. Balancing his chin on his knees, he breathed deeply, the way Aunt May would when “finding her calm” during bouts of morning yoga. He inhaled through his nose, then released it through his mouth. Slowly, carefully, with his hands spread like balancing weights on a scale, he stood up again.

He tried walking in circles. One summer a few years back, he and Ned had attended a week-long wilderness survival camp in Catskill Mountains State Park. Ned had been much more enthusiastic about the trip, but Peter had picked up a few tips along the way. For instance, _if you’re lost or have lost something, try moving out in circles from your point of origin. This way, you’ll cover a great deal of ground without moving too far from your starting place._ However, this was a tip for surviving in the woods. Not entirely applicable to the afterlife, or wherever he was. But then again, it wouldn’t hurt to try.

In the distance, someone called out. He couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from, only that it was a woman’s voice. Peter froze mid-circle and spun 360 degrees in place. His senses, already heightened, became sharp as new-cut glass.

The cry came again. This time, it was much clearer. He turned toward it. Across the gray plain, jogging toward him, was a woman’s figure obscured by distance. Instinctively, Peter took a step back. He waited to see if his heightened senses would warn him of approaching danger. Nothing happened, although he couldn’t be sure if that was just another effect of being dead or not.

“Hello!” the woman cried out. “Hi, do you know what happened? Do you know where we are?”

Peter’s heart launched into his throat. It didn’t need to beat, but it did, fierce and wild with ecstatic relief. Immediately, he was running full-tilt toward the approaching figure. “Aunt May!” he called, his voice pitching high with excitement. “May, it’s me!”

The woman stopped dead, and even at a distance, Peter could see the shock bloom across her face. And then she started running—not jogging, but full-out sprinting, toward him.

They met in the middle, falling into each other in a tangle of arms and relieved cries. “Oh, my God,” Aunt May said against Peter’s shoulder, “Peter, thank God!”

Peter felt that maybe it was a little soon for thanking anyone. Reluctantly, he pulled away. He looked at his aunt with an expression that was halfway between anxiety and relief. “Aunt May,” he started in a shaky voice. Then, not having any idea how to tell her they had both been killed by a huge, insane, grape-flavored alien for the (supposed) good of the universe, he tapered off into silence. He glanced over his shoulder, nervous and jittery and uncomfortable. 

“Peter.” Aunt May put a hand on his cheek, turning his head so that he was looking at her again. “What’s wrong? Where are we? And what are you _wearing?_ ”

Peter glanced down. In a moment of stark horror, he realized he was still wearing the Iron Spider suit. But then he remembered that he was dead, and who cared if Aunt May knew the truth when they had much bigger and more terrifying fish to fry. Even so, he decided to at least _try_ to cover his tracks one last time. “It’s a science project I’m working on with Ned,” he said lamely. “I can tell you all about it when we get out of here.”

May fixed him with a look that said she believed absolutely none of that. “Ned was with me,” she said, her voice taking on the distinctive stern note of a concerned and suspicious mother-figure. “When… when whatever happened, happened, we were in the apartment. There was something he wanted to tell me, but he couldn’t seem to get past the first few ‘ _well, um_ ’s. I assumed it had something to do with you.” Peter was about to reply, but she hurried on. “Before he could tell me, everything just sort of… _faded_ , and then I woke up here. Ned was still with me; he’s back there.” She pointed vaguely back over her shoulder. “We decided to walk in opposite directions to see if we could find anyone else, and then meet back in the middle in ten minutes or so. That was… well, probably ten minutes ago.” She frowned. “Although I can’t tell in this place. I wish I’d been wearing a watch.”

“We’re dead,” Peter blurted out before he could stop himself. Her nervous rambling had brought back his crushing anxiety, and he couldn’t bear to be the only one who knew. “I’m so sorry, Aunt May, I should’ve…” He’d been about to say _I should’ve stopped this,_ but that would’ve led to awkward questions and even more awkward answers. Voice shaking like a tree in an earthquake, he repeated, “I’m so, so sorry.”

Aunt May must’ve seen the panicked look on his face, because she immediately moved in for another hug. “It’s okay,” she said softly. “Whatever happened, whatever comes next, at least we’re together. Right?”

Peter swallowed the lump in his throat. He closed his eyes for a moment, blinking back tears. _I wish it wasn’t like this_ , he wanted to say. _I wish you could’ve lived. In case we can never go back; I wish I could’ve saved you._

“It’s alright,” May said again. “Let’s get back to where I started. We’ll meet up with Ned, then figure out where to go from there. Okay?”

Peter nodded. The hug ended but they stayed close to each other, walking side-by-side over the gray plains.

. . . . . .

Back in Wakanda, Natasha was getting ready to leave. 

“I have to, Steve,” she said when he appeared in the doorway, frowning slightly and looking vaguely hurt and confused. “I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

“You really won’t tell me where you’re going, huh?” Steve asked. His voice, as it had been since the Great Battle, was low and rough. These days, he always looked like he’d been crying.

Natasha’s heart clenched. She turned away, forcing another carefully folded and rolled shirt into her compressible mission pack. “Of course I will,” she said. “Just because I haven’t doesn’t mean I won’t. Ask, and I’ll tell.”

There was a trace of a smile in Steve’s next words. “Historically,” he replied, “that hasn’t exactly been the case.”

Natasha zipped up her pack and pressed the button on the side. It compressed to a quarter its size. She slung it over her shoulder, turning back to face Steve. If he’d been smiling before, he wasn’t now. She sighed. “It’s Barton,” she said. “He called last night. Apparently, his whole family dusted before his eyes.”

“Oh, my God.” Steve’s face tightened with pain. “That’s horrible. I’m so sorry, Nat.”

Natasha shook her head. She tilted her head back, blinking against the sting of impending tears. Once she’d gotten control, she looked down again. “Not your fault, Rogers,” she said. She adjusted her pack and crossed the room, ghosting past him in the doorway. For a moment she hesitated in the metallic hall beyond, looking back in the half-light of early morning. “You’ve gotta stop blaming yourself. You did everything you could.”

Steve smiled. A soft, sad smile. “Everything?” 

Natasha blinked, turning away again. “Tell Princess Shuri where I’m going, and why. I don’t want her thinking I’m taking one of her Quinjets for no good reason.”

“Dagger,” Steve corrected. “The ships. They’re called Daggers.”

Natasha caught his eye and held it. “You spent a lot of time here,” she said softly. “Didn’t you?”

Steve nodded. Even in the lightless corridor, his eyes shone bright with unshed tears. “Yeah.” His voice was hoarse. “He liked it here. King T’Challa, Princess Shuri, everyone else, they did so much for him. I think…” He visibly swallowed, blinking rapidly. “…I think he was happy, Nat.”

She wanted desperately to reach for him. To wrap her arms around him and tell him it was going to be okay. But she didn’t know for sure. She couldn’t know for sure, and she wasn’t going to lie to him about that. Instead, she said, “Remember the plan, Steve. It’s not over yet.”

He half-smiled: a tiny victory. “Tell Barton I’m so sorry,” Steve said, still in that hoarse, rough voice. “And tell him we’ll get them back. All of them.”

Natasha nodded. For a long moment, she held Steve’s gaze. And then she started down the hall in the direction of the aircraft hangar. “I’ll be back ASAP,” she called over her shoulder. In the most playful tone she could muster, she added, “Don’t wait up for me, Rogers.”

“I won’t,” Steve replied. “Be safe, Nat.”

She rounded a corner and left him behind.

. . . . . .

Shuri was 99.999% sure she was right. Of course, that 0.0001% chance she was wrong hovered in her subconscious as she adjusted variables and ran simulations late into the night. For once, she thought, it would be incredible to be wrong. 

By the time morning dawned on the third day since the Great Battle, she’d slept a grand total of seven hours and consumed more coffee in two days than an average university student in a month of Mondays. Bruce Banner had lasted longer than she’d expected, but halfway through the night, he’d finally given in and slept. He was propped up in a chair across the circular lab, his mouth open as he gently snored. Although he’d told her to wake him if she needed him, she’d decided to let him rest. Mostly because she didn’t need him. But she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, and he really did need the sleep.

She had just finished running a complex simulation predicting the fallout of Jupiter’s disappearance over the next few months when a flash of familiar blonde hair caught her eye. She turned to see Steve Rogers standing just outside the lab, looking for all the world like a Golden Retriever who’s brought back the wrong ball. He smiled at her, that soft, slightly sad smile that told you immediately what kind of man he was.

“Can I help you, Captain Rogers?” she asked, turning back to her simulation. Although she liked Steve, she didn’t exactly have time to cater to his emotionally fragile state when the future of mankind was at stake. 

“It’s Nat,” Steve said. “Romanoff, I mean. She’s taking a Dagger ship to pick up an old friend.”

“Clint Barton,” Shuri said. “She told me.”

She read the confusion in Steve’s silence. “Oh,” he said. “She told me to tell you.”

Shuri smiled to herself. “If I had to guess,” she said, moving around a metal table as she manipulated the screen to zoom in on a particularly worrying cluster of Trojan asteroids that seemed to be making an orbital beeline for Earth, “which I don’t, then I’d say she was trying to get you to talk to someone.”

Steve laughed, more of a surprised sound than a cheerful one. “Oh,” he said again. “Yeah, that sounds like something she would do.” Another beat of silence. Then he added, “Well, I don’t want to disturb your work, so I guess I’ll just…”

Shuri saw an opportunity and took it. “Dr. Banner’s asleep,” she said, spinning to face him, “and I need an assistant to test out some new tech.” She jerked her head at a few sealed boxes stacked on the desk across the room. “Your accelerated healing makes you the perfect candidate for these trials.”

As she’d expected, Steve’s face showed none of the hesitance that most people might feel at being asked to demonstrate their accelerated healing skills. Instead, he looked relieved. “Thank you, Princess,” he said gratefully. “I’d be honored to help in whatever way I can.”

Smiling with satisfaction, Shuri zoomed back out on the simulation, adjusted a few variables, and reset it. She could spare a few minutes while the program ran to distract Steve from his problems. He was a good man, and if she could help him, she would. And besides, he _was_ perfect for her trials.

Walking across the lab, she picked up the biggest of the metal boxes. Hefting it in her arms, she crossed to the largest table and dumped out its contents. “I was working on this before the battle,” she announced, setting the now-empty box on the ground, “but I didn’t finish it in time.”

On the table, gleaming like fish scales in moonlight, was a pile of sleek, shiny black material. Grabbing it by the shoulders, she held it up to her body. The suit fell in front of her like a waterfall of shifting, shimmering night. She turned to Steve, raising an eyebrow. “What do you think?” she asked. “You want to help me test it out?”

“Oh, my God,” said Steve. “Is that…?”

Shuri grinned. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thank you so much to everyone who's left feedback on this story so far! I have no idea what I did to deserve such amazing and kind commentors, but y'all are incredible and ilu all so much! <3 And now, for another round of messy scenes that I didn't edit because I'm lazy af. Whoo!


	4. On the Edge of Eternity

**Chapter Four**

**On the Edge of Eternity**

With a flash of green light, Thanos appeared on the endless gray plains of the Soul Realm. He was silent, still, staring out past the lone temple toward the eternal sunset beyond. It was a reflection of his mind, a mirror-like lake of inner calm. A place to escape into, to shape however he wanted without affecting the more permanent and stable reality beyond. 

There was a big problem with this Realm, however: he hadn’t counted on the trapped souls having minds of their own.

The worst by far was Gamora. Altered by the Soul Stone, she’d reverted to her younger self, small and wide-eyed. Despite the regression, she’d managed to retain her quite ferocious and formidable will. That, and her sharp tongue.

Thanos strode across the gray plains toward the temple. He reached the steps and paused, frowning. “Gamora,” he said. It wasn’t a question. When the little girl didn’t appear at once, he took another step up into the structure. He looked around. Nothing. “Gamora!” he called, louder this time. He injected his voice with a stern, warning edge. “Gamora, I need to speak with you.”

“No.” Gamora’s voice cut through the silence like a heated blade through butter. Turning, Thanos spotted her, standing with her back to the temple a good twenty yards away. In the ever-present breeze, the bright tips of her hair waved like bloody banners. “ _I_ need to speak with _you._ ”

Thanos’s frown grew deeper than the valleys of his chin. He approached Gamora, reaching her in a few long strides. He stood beside her, staring out over the gray wastes. “What is it, my child?” His voice was deep, rumbling. Like summer thunder on a calm night.

Gamora’s entire body tensed. “I am not your child,” she spit. “I was never yours. I never will be.”

Thanos didn’t reply. Of course she was his. He had her trapped forever. Where else could she go? It was a useless argument, and one he’d grown tired of having. 

Gamora kept her gaze straight ahead. She lifted her chin. The wind seized her hair; she’d let it loose, and it billowed behind her like a mustang’s mane. “You’re dying,” she said. Casual, uninflected—a cold, empty fact.

Thanos followed her gaze out over the plains. “Why do you say that?” He was genuinely curious. Although Gamora had said many things to him since that fateful day on Vormir, she had never lied. Not as far as he could tell, anyway. And, given the fact that he’d taught her to lie, he was pretty sure he could tell.

Finally, Gamora turned to him. She stood as tall as she could, gaze sharp as barbed wire: a fearless child facing down a mighty god. “You aren’t worthy.” Her voice was half a whisper. Thanos could tell she was trying to tamp it down, but emotion crept into her voice like a disease. “You never were. You never will be.” Her mantra. Her repetitive, unceasing mantra.

Thanos sighed, disappointed. “My daughter…” he started, but she cut him off with a snarl.

“I am _not_ your daughter!” She took a step back, hands curling into tiny, useless fists. “You’re no father to me! Abuse isn’t love. Terror isn’t trust. And _this_ —” she gestured between them, lips curled and teeth bared, “—is nothing but servitude built on manipulation and torment.” She spit on the ground between them, not breaking eye contact as she did. “I hate you,” she said, “and when the time comes, I’ll be the one to kill you. If my sister or the Gauntlet doesn’t kill you first.”

Thanos felt red-hot anger surge beneath his skin. His fingers dug into his palms. But then the metal of the Gauntlet slid against his fingertips, the stones shimmering behind his knuckles, and he remembered himself. He let his shoulders fall, and his frown relax into a smile. “I know you’re angry now,” he said, “but what I did was for the best. Someday, you’ll come to understand that.”

To his surprise, Gamora didn’t reply for a long moment. She turned away, her eyes as cold and distant as the unbroken plains. “You’re dying. You aren’t worthy, and the Gauntlet is killing you.”

Thanos looked down at her. His eyes narrowed. “Why do you say that?” he asked again.

Gamora shrugged. “It’s true. And there’s more. Other things you don’t know.”

Thanos crouched down. He braced his elbows on his knees, trying to meet her eyes. She stubbornly looked away. “Gamora,” he said sternly, “I need you to tell me what’s wrong.”

She laughed. A high, half-insane laugh. “You don’t know? You really don’t know?”

Thanos sighed. “No, my child.”

She didn’t correct him this time. Instead, she turned to him with a sneer. “When you wiped out half of everything,” she said, voice low and intense, “you wiped out half of _everything_. Planets, stars, dark matter, dust, even _light_!” As she spoke, her eyes seemed to glow gold. She blinked, and the light faded. Thanos couldn’t be sure if he’d imagined it or not. “You think you’re in control, but you’re not. You played with fire, and now you’re trapped in the burning building.” She grinned like this thought pleased her, and anger flashed through Thanos’s chest like lightning striking an old tree. 

Thanos rose to his full height. He clenched his fists. The Gauntlet bent to accommodate him, folded around his fingers and wrist. “I see what you’re trying to do. It won’t work. You cannot make me angry.” 

Little Gamora’s eyes narrowed. “Lair,” she whispered. 

Thanos looked away. Back toward the temple, standing alone in the swirling silver mist. The only landmark for a billion miles. “I’m leaving now,” he announced. He wasn’t sure if he was addressing her, or himself. “When I’m ready to speak to you again, I will return. Don’t stray too far. The gray wastes are a dangerous place. Even for the dead.”

As he turned and walked away, he watched her out of the corner of his eye. She turned back toward the empty plains. Her hands clenched by her sides, hair sweeping over her shoulders like a waterfall of blood-stained tar. “When you’re dead,” she called out, “who will undo the damage you’ve caused?”

Thanos ignored her. Or he tried to, at least. As he walked back through the temple toward the glowing blue crack in spacetime that would transport him back to reality, her words echoed in his head. Long after he’d returned to his quite place in the mountains, where he settled down to watch the real sun set over the lush green lands he’d saved, he couldn’t shake her words. Because somewhere, in some deep corner of his subconscious, he knew she was right.

. . . . . .

Shrouded in enchantments so thick not even the wielder of the Infinity Gauntlet himself could break them, Loki Odinson watched the Mad Titan walk through a glowing blue split in spacetime and disappear. As soon as he was sure Thanos was gone, Loki strode across the flat gray plains toward the little girl standing on the edge of eternity.

“I must warn you,” Loki said when he was close enough for her to hear, “that if you try to attack me, it will spell disaster for both of us. Not to mention every other thing, living and dead.”

The green-skinned and bright-eyed alien child spun around. She held her fists up, feet scooted apart, braced for battle. “Who’s there?” she called out. Her dark eyes narrowed as she scanned the mist.

Loki laughed. He let the illusions slip away, bit by bit, until he stood before her in his Asgardian guise. “I am Loki of Asgard,” he told her, “and I am here to offer you your freedom.”

The little girl lifted her chin. Her eyes flashed gold. “No one can give me my freedom,” she said. “I’ll take it back myself.”

Loki smiled. Already, he liked this fierce, stubborn girl with fire in her eyes. “In that case,” he replied, taking a few graceful steps toward her, mist swirling around his booted feet like the hem of a cloak, “I’m here to offer you revenge.”

For a moment she considered him, eyes narrowed and lips slightly parted. He read the hesitance in the tense lines of her lithe, tiny body. Slowly, she lowered her fists. She straightened up, abandoning her fighting stance. She tilted her head to one side, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’m listening,” she said. “What’s your plan?”

Loki smiled, bright and mischievous. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me that.”

. . . . . .

Millions of light-years away, Tony and Nebula were building a ship. While Tony worked through his initial shock-slash-panic attack, Nebula combed the abandoned city of the Titans for anything they could use (or eat or drink) in their quest to get off the dead planet. Once she’d salvaged as much as she could from the ruins, Nebula returned to find Tony working feverishly on dislodging what appeared to be a head-sized, glowing blue orb from the wreck of Thanos’s ship.

“Let me help,” she said, with no intention of actually letting him let her do anything. 

“No, I’ve got it.” His voice was rough, clipped. He did a good job of hiding it, but her quick eyes caught the way his hands shook and his pale skin gleamed with sweat. Finally, he managed to pull the glowing ball free. He fell back, holding it tight. He lifted the orb, examining it in the dusky red light of afternoon. “Huh. Lucky for us, it looks like this thing runs on some sort of advanced electron/muon propulsion system. Not quite as impressive as I’d hoped, but it’ll do. Piece of cake.”

Nebula crossed her arms over her chest. She had no idea why he was talking about cake at a time like this, but she let it go. She was hungry, too, and after what had happened to the Earth boy (his son? she wasn’t entirely sure, but they’d seemed close) she didn’t blame him for acting strange. “We should repurpose one of the shuttles,” she said. “I know where they are and how to detach them from the main ship.”

Tony set the orb aside, wincing as he did. He put a hand to his flank; she noticed the bloodstains under his fingers. “Good plan,” he said, clearly trying (and failing) to mask the residual pain in his voice. He played it off like he was wiping his hands on his shirt. “With two of us, there’s no need to build a flying Hearst Mansion. On the other hand, a private spaceship nightclub _would_ be a dream come true.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

He shook his head, letting out his breath in a long, heavy exhale. “It’s a Hollywood thing. Hand me those pliers.” He pointed to the bag of supplies she’d gathered.

Somewhat reluctantly, she handed over the pliers. She stood up. “I’m going to find water,” she told him. “When Titan’s sun rises tomorrow, we’ll cook alive without it.”

“That’s cheerful,” said Tony. He rubbed the pliers on his shirt, then blew on them. A cloud of orange rust billowed, thick and cloying, in the dusty air. “ _Bonne chance_. _Buena suerte._ Or whatever they say where you’re from.”

She left him alone with the rusty pliers and the glowing orb. Overhead, the sky changed from red and orange to black. Pale, blinking stars stared down at her as she picked her way across the battered wasteland of the once-lush planet. She headed for the other side of the city ruins with a single, desperate purpose in mind: to find water before the morning sun found her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heeey, so I wrote two chapters in one weekend! I guess I have to turn in my letter of resignation to the Kingdom of Procrastination now. No, but seriously, thank you SO MUCH to everyone who left feedback on the previous three chapters! I'm definitely one of those authors who is incredibly motivated by comments, and it makes me so absurdly happy to hear that people are enjoying my self-indulgent attempt at fixing my feelings after Infinity War broke them all. Having said that, I apologize in advance if I butchered Loki and/or Tony's personalities. For some reason, those two are the hardest MCU characters for me to write, and I can never seem to get them right. But at least I can say I tried!
> 
> Anyway, this author's note is getting so long it's turning into a chapter in its own right, so I'll shut up now. But before I shut up, one last thing: I know that the chapter name is ridiculously dramatic/pretentious and, as my creative writing professor would say, "Captial 'P'" poetic, but that's just how it is. Deal with it! ;D


	5. Mass Hysteria

**Chapter Five**

**Mass Hysteria**

Natasha had agreed to meet Clint at a private runway in New York City. Rhodey offered to fly with her, since he was headed back to the Avengers Compound to check on Pepper and Tony (who, as far as anyone knew, was still MIA), but Natasha politely declined. 

“When I get off the plane,” she told Rhodey as they stood side-by-side in the massive, high-ceilinged airport of Birnin Zana, “I want to be the first thing Barton sees. I don’t want him to feel like this is a big deal. It is, but he has to ease into it.”

“I get it.” Rhodey nodded. His eyes were full of sympathy. “He lost his whole world. It’ll take some time to get his head back in the game.”

Natasha smiled. She laid a hand on Rhodey’s arm. “Good luck,” she said earnestly. “Say ‘hi’ to Pepper for me. And Tony, if you can find him.” Cocking an eyebrow, she turned and walked away.

The flight from Wakanda to New York took a bare ten hours—impressive when compared to the seventeen-plus hours it would take on a commercial jet. Natasha put in her earbuds at the beginning of the trip; she fully meant to listen to music, but ended up sitting in silence. The Dagger knew the route; she let the AI steer. As she flew over the Atlantic toward distant New York, she felt ghostly somehow. Cut off from reality. Like a gust of wind or condensation on a window pane. Half a memory beginning to fade.

When she stepped out of the Dagger at the Atlantic Aviation private runway in New York, Clint Barton was standing on the pavement in his full tactical gear. He’d slung his bow across his back. A bristle of arrows stuck up behind his right shoulder. 

In that moment, he was the realest thing she’d ever seen.

“Barton.” Natasha closed the pilot’s hatch and strode toward him. He stood still, unmoving, until she reached him. Then he fell into her like a tree cut at its base. Heavy, broken, in pain. She moved forward to catch him. “Clint,” she said, softly. She slid her gloved hands up his back, tracing the line of his spine through the gray fabric of his jacket. She cupped the back of his neck with one hand. The other spread at the small of his back, pulling them together.

“Nat,” he mumbled into her shoulder. He tucked his chin, his forehead resting on the rubbery material of her combat suit. He breathed erratically, his chest rising and falling too fast. His heart, on the other hand, beat as slow and solemn as a funeral drum. “They’re gone, Nat. All of them. Just… gone.”

 _I’m here,_ she thought. _I won’t leave you. I promise._ But it wasn’t what he needed to hear. And how could she make a promise like that, anyway? So she stayed silent, rubbing her thumb through the tiny, sharp hairs at the base of his neck, breathing in day-old coffee and carbon-fiber polyester. 

Clint pulled back after a long, heavy moment. Natasha couldn’t help it—her observational skills kicked in at once; she noticed the dark circles under his eyes, the way he held himself like a plastic bag left by the freeway: crumpled and battered and torn. “Sorry,” he said, although she had no idea what he was apologizing for. He looked at her, then immediately glanced away. “This—” he gestured at himself, making a disgusted face, “—isn’t something you should have to deal with.”

Natasha crossed her arms over her chest. “Barton,” she said. Then, not wanting to distance him too much, she started over. “Clint, listen. Whatever I can do to help, I’ll do it. You know I’m always here for you.”

He looked up. His expression told her that maybe he didn’t know that. It occurred to her that although she’d always meant to, she’d never said it out loud.

She smiled at him. Tilted her head to one side, raised an eyebrow slightly—the expression she used to mask internal conflict and pain. “Rogers told me to tell you we’re working on a way to bring them back.” It was a cop-out, and she knew it. She could comfort him without making any promises herself. “And knowing Rogers, he’ll find a way to keep his word. Even if it kills him.”

A shadow passed over Clint’s face. “Nat, I should’ve come. Last week, when you called… I should’ve come, I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. Moving closer, she took his hand and risked the fall. “They’re your family,” she said firmly. “None of us ever expected you to choose us over them.” She smiled again, tilting her head. There was a lump in her throat she couldn’t quite swallow. 

She squeezed his hand, then let it go.

He stood there for a long moment. The two of them alone in the dusky light, wordless and secretly afraid. “It’s chaos,” he said at last. “In the city. In the country. Everywhere, people are losing their goddamn minds.”

Natasha frowned. She hadn’t thought about that. In Wakanda, Okoye, M’Baku, and Shuri had worked so quickly to quell the panic that it had never gotten past the initial stages of fear. Of course, Birnin Zana was an isolated city—a technological wonder where miracles were commonplace—and the Great Battle had happened there, so people knew what had caused The Fade in the first place. Panic was still inevitable, but on a smaller scale. Armed with knowledge, strong leadership, and faith in each other and the strength of their nation, the Wakandans were facing the crisis with admirable bravery and hope. However, now that Natasha thought about it, she was certain that cities like New York and London were dealing with the issue much less gracefully. At some point, that would have to be addressed. 

Unfortunately, there was no time like the present.

“What happened?” she asked. Like it would just be one thing. Like she didn’t already know what happened when people lost their minds.

Clint let out his breath in a long, slow sigh. Then, smiling very, very slightly, he said, “Oh, y’know. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling, forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from their graves. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together—mass hysteria.”

Natasha half-smiled back at him. “Did you just use a _Ghostbusters_ quote as a mission report?” 

“It wasn’t a mission report,” Clint said, but his tiny smile grew a little wider. “I’m retired, remember? I can quote whatever I want. Whenever I want.”

“I know you can.” Natasha tried to laugh. The sound was flat around the edges, dull as an old blade. 

“I think the more important question is: did you just laugh at my _Ghostbusters_ reference? And if so, who are you, and what did you do with Agent Romanoff?”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “Do you think you’re funny, Barton?”

“Only on the days that end with ‘Y’,” he said, and she laughed again. This time, it was a little sharper. A little more real.

Unexpectedly, he reached for her hand. She turned her palm up, weaving their fingers together. He moved closer, and she tilted her head up, watching him. She saw herself reflected in his eyes. “Do you think there’s a chance?” he asked. His voice was soft. A gentle breeze could blow it away. 

“For us?” she asked, before she could stop herself.

He blinked. “For all of us. For the people that faded. You think we can get them back?”

She licked her lips, stalling. “I don’t know. You want me to be honest, Clint? I have no idea.”

“I know.” His voice was quiet. There was a storm in his eyes—conflict rolling, thunderclouds ready to burst. “Thanks, Nat. For being here.”

The storm in him washed through her, adrenaline flooding her veins. “Always,” she said. The lie fell heavy from her tongue.

. . . . . .

“Without your shield,” Shuri said, dodging a kick aimed directly at her chest, “you aren’t nearly as intimidating.”

Steve swung again. He missed, and this time Shuri had the distinct impression he’d done it on purpose. “I left the shield behind for a reason,” Steve insisted. He took a step back, rubbing a row of cat-like scratches on his forearm. For a moment, Shuri was afraid she’d accidentally hurt him. But then she remembered what Okoye had told her about Steve’s attempt to comfort the talking raccoon—Rocket, she thought his name was—while Rocket was fixing one of the downed Wakandan Daggers. Okoye, who had found out that Rocket was a talented mechanic, had put him to work at once. Unfortunately, no one had warned Steve (kind, empathetic Steve, who would rather die than ignore someone in need) that Rocket’s grief, anger, and hopelessness had bottled up and formed a perfect storm of teeth and claws. He didn’t need comfort, Rocket had insisted. He needed his friends—his _family_ —back. 

Shuri knew exactly how he felt.

“You should get a rabies shot.” Shuri jerked her chin at the scratches. She inhaled deeply, savoring the way the fabric of the new suit filtered out extra oxygen, flooding her lungs and heightening her brain power. It was a rush, wild and high and heady. “I’ve heard raccoons can carry all kinds of diseases.” She said it jokingly, but he took her seriously. 

“You might be right. Y’know…” he said thoughtfully, rubbing the scratches. They’d already half-healed; it had been less than an hour since the incident. “…I don’t think I’ve gotten any shots since 1942.”

Shuri straightened up. “You don’t need shots,” she said, stating what should be obvious. “Not anymore.” For a moment, she wasn’t sure if she was talking about him, or about herself. Inside the suit, she felt alive. Invincible, untouchable. Although she’d never fought like her brother, she knew how to hold her own. She’d taken most of the hits Steve dished out (or the ones he’d accidentally landed, at least) and so far, she was unscathed. Steve, on the other hand, was sporting at least two fist-sized bruises on his stomach and solar plexus, and another on his shin. Sure, that had been a bit of a low blow, Shuri thought, but all’s fair in love and war.

Steve pulled his sleeve down over the scratches. He shrugged his massive shoulders, shaking his head. “How much longer do you want to do this?” She read the subtext in his words: _are you okay, or do you need to take another breather_?

“Last time we took a break,” Shuri said, falling back into a crouch, “you wandered off and got mauled by a talking raccoon. I think it’s in your best interest to stick with me. At least _my_ claws don’t break the skin.”

Steve laughed. He ran a hand through his long, somewhat matted blonde hair. “If you insist,” he said, and fell into a fighting stance. Fists up, thumbs laid across his curled fingers. Ready to dance or die.

They’d just fallen back into a ritual of slashes, kicks, and punches when Okoye strode into the room. She saluted. “My Princess.” She addressed Shuri in Xhosa, ignoring Steve completely. “There are three outsiders requesting access to our runway in seven hours. Should I let them through the shields?”

“General.” Shuri reached up and pulled off her mask, then returned the salute. She blinked, readjusting to the overly-bright overhead lights. She frowned. “What kind of outsiders?”

“One of them is Colonel James Rhodes, who fought with us against Thanos,” Okoye replied. She held herself like a fire-hardened spear, strong and upright. Shuri noticed the way her gaze lingered on the lines of Shuri’s new suit. The General’s mouth tilted into a wary frown. “The others are unknown to me.”

Shuri sighed. She turned to Steve. Switching back to English, she said, “Sorry, Captain Rogers, but we’ll have to finish this another time.” She reattached the mask to the neckline of the suit. It fell limp around her shoulders. “Duty calls.”

“No problem.” Steve’s smile was strained. Forced. He gave a little half-wave, awkward and out of place, as Okoye strode gracefully back out of the room. “Thanks for the workout. I needed that.”

As she followed Okoye, Shuri threw a mischievous smile over her shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “You really did.”

Steve huffed a laugh. The door slid shut behind her, and she turned to face the day ahead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This week is kicking my ass. Midterms hit me like five tons of brick, my sister's birthday is this weekend, and I still gotta make a Mother's Day card for my mom, because she's amazing and deserves All The Best Things. So if I don't manage to update for a few days (or even until next week), that would be why! Real life sucks, but since I haven't found a plausible way to escape my responsibilities (yet) that doesn't include forging a passport and/or moving to the Moon, that's just how it goes! Anyway, hope y'all enjoy this unedited disaster of a chapter, and as always, thank you SO MUCH to everyone who left me such kind words and excellent feedback on the past chapters! Y'all are fuckin rockstars and I appreciate all of you more than I can ever say! :,D


	6. The Projector

**Chapter Six**

**The Projector**

As far as Peter Quill was concerned, there was only one thing worth doing in the Soul Realm, and that was finding Gamora. He started out over the gray wastes, determination in every step, jaw set and fists clenched. Drax and Mantis followed close behind. He didn’t need to look back or hear the steady tread of Drax’s booted feet against the strange, rubbery ground, to know that.

He was surprised, however, to find that the wizard had followed him. He paused, shielding his eyes as he turned toward the bright horizon. A tall, be-robed figure stood beside his two regular companions. He stopped, frowning. “What’re you doing here?” he asked—not intending to sound rude (well, not _too_ rude), and mostly failing.

Dr. Strange (that was his name, right? Peter hadn’t really cared enough to remember) sighed. He crossed his arms over his chest. “I can see you won’t be dissuaded,” the wizard said, “and since it’s up to me to save the universe, and _you_ happen to be critical to doing that, here I am.”

Peter straightened up slightly at this. He raised his eyebrows, processing. Then he pointed a finger at his own chest. “Wait, _me_? I’m critical to saving the universe?” 

Dr. Strange made a face that suggested he’d rather lick a poisonous frog than admit to this, but he inclined his head slightly in agreement. “Yes,” he said grudgingly. And then, under his breath, “Unfortunately.”

“Dude!” Peter said. He grinned at Drax and Mantis. Mantis beamed back. Drax moved forward, and slapped him heartily on the shoulder, nearly knocking him over. 

“Congratulations, Quill,” boomed Drax. “You always knew you were special.”

Peter felt like there might be an underhanded compliment in there somewhere, so he slapped Drax back. “Thanks, man,” he said, still beaming. And then something occurred to him—something big. Something _epic._ “Hey, hold up. If I save the universe, doesn’t that make me, like, I dunno, a Guardian of the _Universe_?”

Mantis nodded enthusiastically. “We could rename ourselves!” she said. “People would respect us even more!”

“Uh, _us_?” said Peter, just as Dr. Strange cut him off.

“First,” said the wizard, “no one respects you right now—remember, we lost the war and Thanos killed us all—and second, this isn’t about fame and glory. If we do this right, no one will even know it was us who put universe back on track.”

Peter was suddenly a lot less enthusiastic about this plan. But he wanted to keep up the illusion of heroism, so he put on a brave face and nodded solemnly. “I know,” he said. “But true heroes are people who do good stuff because it’s right, not because of the glory, or because they can make a lot of money doing it, or because it makes them really hot to all the—”

Dr. Strange cleared his throat, cutting Peter off again. “Good. Then you’ll respect the plan?”

Peter thought about this for a moment. “Well, I didn’t say _that._ If it keeps me from finding Gamora, that’s a solid ‘no.’”

Dr. Strange inhaled deeply. He let his breath out in a long, loud _whoosh_. “If I help you find Gamora,” he began, speaking through gritted teeth, “will you agree to do everything you can to help me save the universe?”

Peter looked at Mantis and Drax. Mantis was staring off at the sunset, and Drax seemed too zoned-out to realize Peter was trying to catch his eye. Rolling his eyes, Peter returned his attention to Strange. “Fine,” he said. He spit in his hand, then held it out. “It’s a deal.” 

Dr. Strange stared at his hand in blatant disbelief. “Do I have to?” 

Peter shrugged. “It’s up to you; you wanna make this deal official, or what?” It was almost impossible not to smirk at the horrified look on Strange’s face, and even harder not to laugh when the wizard stepped forward and (very briefly) gripped Peter’s hand. Strange winced, then stepped back and wiped his hand several times on his robes.

“Perfect,” Strange said, sarcasm dripping from every letter. He gave his hand one last wipe, then strode past Peter, away from the bright horizon. “You’ll find Gamora this way,” he announced. “In most versions of events, she ends up near the center of the Stone’s realm.”

Peter’s heart jolted. He took off after the wizard immediately. “Why?” he asked.

“Thanos likes to keep her close.” Strange’s voice was low. Dark. 

Peter’s whole body lit up with rage. “Of course he does.” He inhaled deeply; it only fanned the flames burning in his chest. “That grape-juice-box-looking son of a bitch. Next time I see him, I’, gonna fu—”

“You’ll do nothing,” said Dr. Strange, “unless I tell you to. That was our deal.” He shot Peter a sideway look: a look of warning, and of judgement. 

Peter gritted his teeth. He didn’t say anything. Yeah, he’d promised. But he wasn’t exactly known for his honesty. And if it came down to it, he wasn’t sure he could trust himself not to fall apart again. To throw himself, screaming and swearing, against Thanos like a wave breaking on jagged rocks. 

The four companions walked for what felt like an hour before Dr. Strange suddenly stopped dead. He put a hand on Peter’s arm to stop him. 

“What?” Peter said in a loud whisper. Instinctively, he crouched down and reached for blasters that were no longer there. 

Dr. Strange pointed. Up ahead, glowing a dull yellow-orange, was a head-stone sized object floating in midair. 

“What the shit is that?” said Peter. Drax and Mantis came up on either side, matching his battle-ready, crouched posture. 

“That,” whispered Mantis, her antennae straining forward, “is a very ancient and powerful artifact. I can feel it… whispering… speaking…” 

Dr. Strange shot her a look. “What’s it saying?” he asked, his voice sharp as broken glass.

Mantis closed her eyes. She looked pained. She shook her head, grimacing. “I do not know,” she said. “It is protected by something strong. An entity, not quite alive, but not dead. I cannot read it.”

Dr. Strange looked disappointed for a moment. Then he let his hand fall, and Peter took a step forward, standing out in front of the group. “I know what it is,” the wizard said. He sounded surprisingly calm. 

Peter allowed three beats of silence to pass before he asked, impatiently, “What the hell is it, then?”

“A projector,” Strange said. “I’ve worked with them before. They’re objects, either physical or astral, that allow souls to briefly return to the physical world. They’re usually used to make pacts with spirits, or to resolve disputes between the living and dead. They’re very hard to use, and extremely dangerous if used incorrectly. Even I avoid using them most of the time.”

“What the fuck’s it doing here?” Peter asked, making a broad gesture around at the endless, seemingly unbroken gray plains. “How did it _get_ here?”

Dr. Strange shook his head. There was wariness in his expression, and doubt in his eyes. “No idea,” he said. “Until I know, I suggest none of us get any closer.”

 _Too late,_ Peter thought. Mantis was already creeping closer, seemingly drawn by an unseen, attractive force. Meanwhile, Drax had apparently taken Strange’s declaration of the projector’s dangerousness as a challenge—he had risen to his full height and strode across the gray plains toward the glowing, floating stone with both hands outstretched like a B-movie zombie.

Strange and Peter moved to stop them, but they weren’t fast enough. They managed to restrain Drax, but Mantis slipped away. With shaking, outstretched fingers, she caressed the stone. And then, in a flash of bright green light that rolled out over the plains and crackled like lightning across the sky, she vanished into thin air.

. . . . . .

Not too far away, Bucky stopped for the second time in what felt like days. The harder he ran, the farther away the horizon seemed. He’d been going in circles—he’d stumbled across what looked like his own prints after hours of running—and had to rethink his entire strategy. The nice thing about being dead, he thought, was that he didn’t ever have to eat, drink, or rest. He could run forever without tiring. And he _would_ run forever, if that’s what it took. He would find his way back to Steve, even if it killed him.

_Again._

He wasn’t even sure that was possible. Probably not, but if it were, he’d risk a million deaths for Steve. That had always been true, but now in a much more literal sense. It was clear as day to everyone who knew them (and even to many who didn’t) what they would give up for each other. 

Everything. Bucky had promised _everything_ if he just made it out of this hellscape alive. If he could see Steve one more time and finally, _finally_ tell him the truth. _The_ truth. The essential, burning truth that mattered more than life and death, pain and loss and grief. A force more powerful than the Infinity Stones—a force beyond time, space, mind, reality, power, or soul. The light between the lines, a power beyond power. A feeling that was a thousand feelings, moments on moments on moments like little waves on a sandy shore.

Bucky stopped, and braced his hands on his knees. He didn’t need too—he wasn’t out of breath, but it was comforting to act like everything was normal. Like he wasn’t dead, or trapped between worlds, or whatever was going on. “Okay,” he said aloud. He shook his head, running the fingers of his metal hand through his hair. Unlike the previous iterations of the appendage, the strands slid through his fingers without catching or pulling. He breathed in, exhaled slowly. “Okay.”

He took off again. This time, he headed away from the horizon. The orange glow caught in the liquid-looking surface under his feet. The farther he got from where he’d begun, the more the endless gray plains looked like an endless gray ocean. Ripples formed, mist dancing on little crests. Bucky felt like he was running on water. His tracks, previous deep and clear, faded moments after he made them. The mist curled around his ankles and climbed up to his calves. Briefly, he entertained the idea that the world around him was sentient. Alive, somehow. But then he realized how absurd that was and pushed the thought aside.

Bucky ran for several hours more. He wasn’t sure how many; time was a mystery in this place. He paused a few times to get his bearings—not that there were any bearings to get—but couldn’t decide if he was making progress or not. And if he was, progress toward what? What was there, other than gray sand and water?

He was just about to give in and take another break when something in the far distance caught his eye. It was a structure of some sort, with a broad, slanted roof and pillars in place of walls. He stopped dead. Narrowing his eyes against the glow of the horizon, he tried to get a better look at the structure. He took a step closer. Then another. 

He was roughly a quarter mile away when he happened to glance down and see two sets of fading footprints beneath the gray crests: the long, slender booted feet of an adult man, and the smaller, more compact tread of a child.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, I am SO SORRY for the long delay between chapters this week. I got hit with the Mother of All Flu Viruses and have been alternating between feverishly sweating to death and forcing myself to do college assignments I would rather dip myself in acid than do, so it's been an Experience. So, I'm still sick af, but I'm lucid enough today to write some shit, so here it is! 
> 
> As always, thank you SO MUCH to everyone who commented/left feedback/kudos on the last chapter (I seriously can't even express how much I adore all you lovely people, thank you!!), and I hope you enjoyed this chapter. Hopefully it's not a fever-induced trainwreck, but if it is, oh well! I tried, and I hope you enjoyed it anyway. :)


	7. Compliments, Compassion, and Crevasses

**Chapter Seven**

**Compliments, Compassion, and Crevasses**

Okoye led Shuri into Birnin Zana’s high-ceilinged air hangar. She stood by the entrance, one hand hovering near her weapon, a slight frown on her face. “They’re over there.” She gestured to three silhouetted figures huddled at the far end of the vaulted room. Two were tall and strangely bulky; the other appeared to be wearing some sort of metallic red overshirt that gleamed in the dim blue strip lights. 

Shuri nodded to Okoye. The princess lifted her chin, pulling back her shoulders. “I’ll talk to them,” she said in Xhosa. “See what they want.” Injected confidence into every step, she approached the newcomers. 

As she got closer, she realized that the two bulky strangers were wearing armored suits. Her heart leapt into her throat. She knew that Colonel Rhodes had gone back to New York to look for Tony Stark, and by the looks of it, he’d found him.

“Princess Shuri.” Rhodes addressed Shuri with a respectful dip of his head. He flipped up the face-plate on his helmet. His expression was conflicted; he smiled, but it was tense, forced. “I’ve brought some guests. Hope you don’t mind.”

Shrui raised an eyebrow. Her curiosity rose. She crossed her arms, tilting her head slightly as she surveyed the two figures standing in the shadows behind the Colonel. “It depends,” she said. “Is one of them Iron Man?”

The other bulky figure stepped out into the dim blue glow of the inner runway lights. Immediately, Shuri’s sharp eyes told her it wasn’t Tony Stark—it was his armor, yes, but someone else was inside the trademark gold-and-red shell. “Princess Shuri,” the figure greeted her. The voice was slightly filtered, electronic and crackling with static. But it was clearly female.

Shuri’s suspicions were confirmed. This wasn’t Tony Stark. 

Who, then, was it?

“I’m Pepper Potts.” The woman in the suit reached up and pressed a button on the side of the helmet. It slid back, revealing her face. She was beautiful, middle-aged with red hair and kind eyes. At once, Shuri recognized her from various Stark Industries-sponsored social galas and tech-centered events. She was always by Tony Stark’s side, the woman behind a great man.

Shuri smiled. “Ms. Potts. You are more than welcome here.”

Pepper Potts smiled warmly. “Thank you, Princess Shuri.” She looked to Colonel Rhodes as if silently asking him what to do or say next.

Shuri, sensing her discomfort, turned to the third member of the little group. “And who are you?” she asked the figure in the shadows.

The figure stepped forward. Shuri was surprised to see that she was young, around Shuri’s own age, with dark curly hair and a mischievous half-smile. She held out a hand—a hand sheathed in what looked like metallic red spandex—to Shuri. “I’m Michelle Jones,” the girl said. She lazily blew a strand of hair away from her face. “My friends call me MJ.”

Shuri took her hand and shook it. “Welcome to Wakanda, Michelle Jones,” she said with a genuine smile. She gestured to the suit Michelle wore, which seemed to be made of some sort of cutting-edge nanotechnology. She couldn’t be sure until she got it back to her lab, but something told her the thin red-and-black armor (like the suits Ms. Potts and Colonel Rhodes wore) had been constructed using Stark Industries tech. “I haven’t seen this suit before. Or you, for that matter.”

Michelle shrugged. “I’m new.” Lifting an eyebrow and looking Shuri up and down, she added, “I like your cat suit. Very New-York-high-fashion meets high-tech-Halloween.”

Shuri laughed. “Thanks, I think?”

“No, it’s a compliment.” Michelle tilted her head. That mischievous little smile crept back onto her face. “You’re killin’ it.”

“This kid broke into the New York Avengers’ HQ and stole a multimillion-dollar Stark Industries tech suit,” Rhodes cut in, gesturing to Michelle. His tone was a mix of impressed and irritated. “I have no idea how she did it, which is the only reason she’s here now. I thought, well, maybe she can help out to make up for trespassing on and stealing Avengers property.”

Michelle rolled her eyes. She crossed her arms over her red-clad chest, where a black spider sat amid a web of black, webbed lines. “I was looking for someone,” she said. “I thought he might be there, but no luck. Found this prototype suit, though, and thought I’d help myself.”

Rhodes sighed. He rubbed a hand over his face, shaking his head. “I was looking for someone, too. No luck on that, either.”

Ms. Potts looked down, her eyes darkening. Shuri read the truth off her face: Tony Stark was still MIA.

Formalities over, Shuri returned to the more pressing matters at hand. “I’m sorry, Colonel,” she addressed Rhodes, “but I need to get back to my lab. The fate of the world is at stake.”

Ms. Potts frowned, looking up. “I’m sorry,” she began, “but what happened? I’m still not clear on everything.”

Shuri sighed. “It would take a while to explain _everything_ ,” she said. “Come back to my lab with me. I’d love to get a look at your tech.” She turned and walked back toward the doorway, where Okoye stood guard. “The woman is Pepper Potts,” she told Okoye in Xhosa, “and the girl is Michelle Jones. They’re with Colonel Rhodes. They’ve come to help in whatever way they can. And,” she added with a smile, “I think I know exactly how to use them.”

Okoye looked somewhat skeptical. She stood aside, and Shuri led the way through the corridor, up several flights of stairs, and down the hall leading to her lab. The newcomers followed close behind, their armored footsteps echoing in the clean, well-lit spaces.

. . . . . .

Back on Titan, Nebula located the Guardians’ ship. Quill and his crew had landed it on the other side of the rubble city; she found it sheltered beneath an overhang of red rock. It seemed intact—nothing she couldn’t fix in a few days—and mostly functional. 

Which only left the moral side of her dilemma to consider. The question was, should she take this ship and go after Thanos herself, leaving Stark to die? Or should she offer him a place onboard and risk mutiny and failure? After all, he wanted to return to Earth, and she didn’t. Bringing him with her would be risky, and at this point, she couldn’t risk much. She’d already lost everything. The only thing keeping her going was the promise of revenge; if Stark took that away, she’d have nothing.

Sitting under the sharp, curved wing of the _Benatar,_ Nebula crossed her arms and stared up at the swirling rubble high in Titan’s atmosphere. She sighed. She’d told Stark she was looking for water; it wasn’t strictly a lie, but she felt slightly guilty (a feeling she wasn’t used to) about leaving him to fend for himself in the growing heat. From what she could tell, his mental state was suffering. The longer he stayed on Titan, the worse he would get. Unless he returned to his own home world sooner than later, Nebula had the sneaking suspicion he would either lose his mind and die, or lose his will to live and die. Either way, she’d feel at least somewhat responsible for his death. And with so much already weighing on her conscious (even if the weight was buried deep, stashed away in the farthest, darkest recesses of her mind), she wasn’t sure she wanted to add any more names to her list of victims. 

In fact, there was only one creature in all of existence she wanted to kill now. And to get to him, she would have to do horrible things. 

She’d do horrible things, yes. Just not today.

Today, she decided to take a chance. Even if it felt wrong, even if it went against her very nature, she would let Stark live. _For Gamora,_ she told herself, _I will do this for my sister._

Gamora had been so fond of her human. If Gamora had seen something worth saving in a guy like Peter Quill, then surely Nebula could find a reason to save a hero like Tony Stark. She’d seen him fight—he’d been the last hero standing against the Mad Titan, determined and fearless to the end—and, in a way, she respected him. He’d stood up against Thanos when everyone else had failed. A mere mortal, fighting with the strength of an immortal, and the wild, reckless abandon that humanity seemed to have in spades. 

Shielding her eyes with her metal hand, Nebula rose to her feet. She broke the combination code on the _Benatar’s_ back door and climbed up into the ship. It took her less than a minute to find a cabinet full of dehydrated food and canteens of water. She took two of the largest bottles, cradling them under her arms. They were ice-cold, comfortably numbing her skin and driving out the pulsing heat of morning.

Stepping back out into the dust and rubble, she closed and locked the door behind her. Shading the bottles with her body, she turned her back on the rising sun and started down the narrow, eroded path toward Titan’s City Center.

She was halfway back when someone cried out. She recognized the sound at once—it was Stark. Setting the bottles down beside a long-dried fountain, she leapt gracefully down the stairs and raced toward the wreck of Thanos’s ship, heading in the direction of the piercing, soul-shattering sound.

. . . . . .

In the Soul Realm, Peter Parker and Aunt May found Ned Leeds crouched over a ten-inch-wide crevasse. The gray sands of the flat, endless plains slid into the crack with a dull hiss. Ned seemed entranced by it, his hand hovering cautiously over the gaping, bottomless abyss. 

Peter called Ned’s name as he approached. Ned stood up, spinning around with an expression of dawning excitement on his face. He ran to meet Peter; Peter opened his arms, grinning widely, and they met in a rib-shattering hug. “Dude,” said Ned, breathless with relief, “I thought you were dead for sure.”

“Dude, we _are_ dead,” said Peter. They broke apart. Peter put a hand on Ned’s shoulder, still smiling way more than what seemed appropriate given the situation. He forced himself to sober up; turning to Aunt May, he gestured between the three of them. “All of us, right now, we’re dead. It’s a long story, so I’ll try to just give you the Cliffnotes.” He took a deep breath, bracing himself. “Okay, here goes. So this evil guy, Thanos—he’s from space, like a real alien from outer space—sent some other evil alien dudes down in this high-tech donut ship—y’know, Ned, the one we saw from the bus?—and so I got on the ship, then Mr. Stark turned up, and we went into space. But then we crash-landed on this alien planet, and the main alien dude, Thanos, showed up and we got in a huge fight. Which we lost, I think. And then Thanos killed half of everyone, which was his evil plan all along.”

Ned reached out and put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, bracing himself. “Are you fucking kidding me? You went to _space_? Holy shit, that is _so cool!_ ”

Aunt May, hovering by Peter’s shoulder, frowned. Peter, who wasn’t sure if it was due to Ned’s strong language or the revelation that her nephew had been playing real-life Superheroes vs. Aliens when he was supposed to be at school, decided to change the subject as quickly as possible.

“So, that crack.” Peter gestured to the crevasse, which seemed to have grown impossibly wider in the half-minute since he’d first seen it. “You have any idea how it got there?”

Ned nodded. “Yeah, man. I watched it open up like five minutes ago. It’s weird—there was this bright flash of green light, and then the ground started shaking. Like an earthquake, only more intense. Then the crack opened up, and it’s been getting bigger ever since.”

Peter swallowed hard. He looked past Ned at the crevasse. The hairs along his arms and on the back of his neck stood on end. Shivers ran up and down his spine. “We should move back,” he told Ned and May. “Just in case, I think we should stay back.”

Ned looked like he wanted to protest, while May looked relieved. The three of them took a few steps back from the crevasse. Peter never took his eyes off it. 

“I wonder what caused it,” May voiced Peter’s thoughts aloud. She frowned, rubbing her wrist nervously. “Peter, you seem to know a lot more about what’s going on than we do. Do you know anything about this?”

Peter opened his mouth, hoping that the gesture itself would invite a moment of revelation, but nothing came to mind. He shook his head. “I wish Mr. Stark was here,” he admitted. “I bet he’d know what it is.”

Suddenly, the ground shuddered. Peter stumbled back; Ned caught him by the arm, barely stopping him from falling. Aunt May went down with a cry. With a thunderous _boom_ , the crevasse yawned suddenly wider. The trickling sand became an avalanche. It slid around them with a horrible hiss, rushing toward the gaping void and pulling them with it. 

“Run!” Peter yelled. He grabbed Aunt May’s hand, tugging her back to her feet. He caught Ned by the wrist, pulling him along as he took off at a dead sprint. 

Behind them, the crack widened. The sand rushed in torrents of gray.

“This is so fucked!” Ned yelled.

“I know!” Peter held his breath as he ran, finding that he didn’t need to breathe to maintain his speed. “I wonder if we can die in here, since we’re already dead!”

“Don’t say that,” Aunt May yelled back. Her face was a mask of panic. “Just shut up and keep going!”

“Sorry, Aunt May!” Peter ducked his head against the breeze, which seemed to be picking up. It was like the crack was sucking everything into its depths—sand, air, and souls. With his heart beating wildly in his chest, Peter gritted his teeth, fixed his gaze on the distant horizon, and focused every bit of his formidable energy on getting himself and his companions out in one piece.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! Took me fuckin' forever to finish this chapter, but I think I'm reasonably happy with it. Thank you so much to everyone who left such encouraging comments on the past chapters!! Y'all are the real MVPs, and I really, really appreciate you taking the time to let me know what you think!! :,D
> 
> Concerning my update schedule (which I'm sure you've already realized is Chaos Incarnate), I've got final exams in two weeks, so my life is hectic AF and will only be getting crazier. Apologies in advance for the infrequent updates, but I just want y'all to know I'm not abandoning this story! Even if it takes me until Infinity War Part 2 comes out to finish it, I'm gonna do everything I can to see it through to the end. :)
> 
> Anyway, hope y'all have an excellent weekend! And to anyone with big exams/finals coming up, BEST OF LUCK!! You've got this!! I believe in you!! <3


	8. Temporal Dissonance

**Chapter Eight**

**Temporal Dissonance**

Loki had died many times. At least he’d experienced death, even if the condition never seemed to stick. It was strange, though, being trapped in the Soul Realm. Unlike the souls that had Faded, he wasn’t dead. When Thanos came for him, he’d known he’d need a plan to make it out in one piece. The Tesseract had been key to his plan; once he figured out where it was, the Time Stone had been equally vital. Although he wasn’t overly fond of its keeper, the green Infinity Gem was a critical part of his plan to defeat Thanos. It had taken plenty of skill, masterful sleight of hand, and a silver tongue, to convince the wizard to let him use the Stone; thankfully, Loki was a master of illusion, and the God of Mischief to boot. So it hadn’t been particularly difficult (although it should’ve been) to get the wizard to give in.

“Where’re we going?” The child, Gamora, stopped. She crossed her arms over her chest, fixing Loki with a piercing stare. “We’ve been walking for hours. Either you tell me where we’re going, or you explain your plan. Until then, I’m staying right here.”

Loki sighed. “If you want anyone to believe you’re not actually a child, stop pouting and making childish threats.”

Gamora glared. It should be odd, Loki thought, to see the sharp, bitter soul of an adult shining through this child’s wide eyes. But when he looked in the mirror, he saw centuries of conflict, anger, and sadness set like chips of green ice in the pale canvas of his own eternally youthful face. Looking at Gamora, Loki felt a pang of recognition. There was something of him in her. An echo of his suffering, his anger, his loneliness and frustration. She was like him, in a way. Maybe in more ways than he knew.

“I’m not moving,” Gamora repeated. She planted her feet, tightening the cross of her arms. Her eyes shone a challenge. “Tell me now. Where are we going?”

Loki pointed to the distant horizon. The eternal, sunless orange sunset cast its dull light over the gray sand and clear, rippling water. “There’s a portal,” he told her, “inside this Realm, leading back to Earth. Have you been to Earth? Lovely place, if you disregard some of the more unpleasant species living there.”

Gamora cocked an eyebrow. She shook her head, red-tipped curls bouncing against her small shoulders. “I know someone from Earth.” There was sadness in her tone. Bitterness, and an undercurrent of longing. “ _Knew_ someone.”

Loki watched her for a long moment. He smiled slightly, looking away. “Ah,” he said. “Well, at least you have some sense of the place, then.” There was a beat of silence. He turned toward the horizon and started walking again. “I’ll tell you more,” he said, “if we keep moving. It might seem like there’s no hurry—being dead can put things in perspective, I know—but we’re just a bit pressed for time.” His lips curved into a half-smile around the word _time._ “The sooner we reach the stairs to the sixth level, the better.”

Gamora shot him a look. “The sixth level? What’re you talking about?”

Loki gestured to the sprawling, flame-colored sky overhead. “It’s an illusion,” he said. “The Soul Realm, or whatever you want to call this place, is made up of seven distinct layers. It’s the same with Midgard, Asgard, Jotunheim…” He trailed off, watching the sky. “Nature has a tendency to arrange itself in hierarchical social and physical structures, I’ve noticed. The Soul Stone’s structure is, in the scheme of things, predictable.” 

Gamora frowned. “Which layer are we on now?”

“The fifth.” Loki held up his hand, and Gamora stopped. He bent a knee and brushed his fingers over the silver liquid beneath their feet. He straightened, holding out his hand. The liquid slid over his skin like a living thing. The droplets collected on his fingertips and fell, spinning and glittering, to the ground. Ripples spread, bullseye patterns fading to gentle swells. “When this surface is completely still, you can see reality reflected in it, filtering down through the layers above. When that happens, the Soul Realm and the universe are aligned. Whatever is outside of the Soul Gem can be seen by the souls within.”

There was a long silence. Gamora bent down and trailed her tiny fingers through the oddly viscous liquid. “When that happens,” she began, her tone slow and thoughtful, “we’ll know where Thanos is.”

Loki nodded. He began walking again. “In theory. And then we can put my plan into action.” 

Gamora wiped her hands on her pants, jogging to catch up. She fell in by his side, her small body tense and upright. Each step was firm and measured. “You’ve talked a lot about your plan,” she said, “without ever saying anything important. When you figure out Thanos’s location, then what? You said you created a portal to the outside. How? Where? Which level is it on?”

Loki sighed. “That’s the tricky part,” he admitted. “The souls of the creatures Thanos destroyed are trapped on this level. The fifth level houses the newly dead—” he gestured to Gamora, “—such as you. And although I’m not actually dead, I find it to be the most comfortable.”

“Let me guess.” Gamora’s tone held a hint of resignation. “The portal is on the seventh level.”

“Yes.” Loki wasn’t going to sugarcoat it. Although she was trapped in a child’s body, Gamora seemed too quick-witted to fall for anything but the truth. “And unfortunately, the sixth and seventh levels exist to keep souls from crawling back out once they’re trapped inside.”

Gamora was silent for a long moment. “How long will it take,” she asked at last, “for us to reach the portal?”

“For us? It could take years.” Before Gamora could respond (and it looked like she had some unkind things to say about this piece of information), Loki continued, “but for the people outside, Thanos included, it’ll only be a week or two. At the most, we’ll be out of this stone prison within a month.”

“So time runs different here,” Gamora said, her frown deepening. “That doesn’t make sense. I learned everything I could about the Soul Stone. I never heard anything about a time difference.”

Loki smiled. “Oh, no. That’s because the time difference is my doing.”

Gamora looked up. Her eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head suspiciously to one side. “How?” she demanded to know.

Loki’s smile turned mischievous. “Thanos attacked my ship, and slaughtered half of the Asgardian people—my people,” he added, with a twisted, humorless half-smile. He cleared his throat and pushed on. “Then he threatened to crush my brother’s head, and, honestly, I wasn’t entirely convinced at first that that wouldn’t make my life a lot easier. But because I need Thor—my brother, that is—alive for my plan to work, I had to save him. Although he doesn’t know it yet, he owes me a lot more than he thinks he does. Which is a lot already.” 

Gamora gave him a sideway look. “You know,” she said, her voice carefully neutral, “you should meet my sister. I think you two would get along.”

Loki glanced down at her. “Is that right? I didn’t know you had a sister.”

Gamora shrugged. “Not by blood. I was a daughter of Thanos. She was a daughter of Thanos. I let her down to impress him, and he did horrible things to her for failing him. I didn’t mean for her to suffer, it’s just… well…” She faded off, shaking her head. Her eyes were full of bitter sadness. “Let’s just say I’m beyond invested in seeing Thanos’s smug, ugly head impaled on a spike. Or on my blade, preferably.” She spit to one side, eyes full of fire. “That creature deserves no mercy.”

“And he’ll get none,” Loki said. “Do you want to hear the rest of my plan?”

Gamora raised an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

Loki hid his smile and continued. “After I averted Thanos’s attention away from my brother by revealing the Tesseract, I just had to wait for my planned diversion to show up. He did, and it worked perfectly. Thanos was distracted just long enough for me to slip away. You see, Thanos was potentially too powerful to be tricked by my magic; his children, however, were much easier to deceive.”

Gamora’s eyes narrowed. He could tell she was trying to work out if this was an underhanded insult or not. She seemed to decide it wasn’t, or that it wasn’t a big enough deal to argue over it. “And then what happened?” she prompted.

“Then I used illusion magic to make it appear as if I were still aboard the ship. While Thanos was wrestling with my distraction, I slipped away. Using the Space Stone, I teleported halfway across the galaxy to Earth. Specifically, to the Sanctum in New York, where a conceited, arrogant, and insufficiently powerful mortal by the name of Stephen Strange was keeping the Time Stone locked away. I met with Strange to discuss Thanos’s arrival, and my plan to stop him.”

The light of realization filled Gamora’s dark eyes. “Oh,” she said. “You used the Time Stone to alter the temporal flow inside the Soul Gem.”

Loki looked down at her, somewhat surprised that she’d caught on so fast. “You’re very bright,” he said, then added, “for a mortal.”

Gamora raised an eyebrow. “You’re very useless,” she said, “for a self-proclaimed god, if you had to ask a mortal for help.”

Loki felt an itch of irritation at this. He straightened his spine and puffed up his chest. “I am more powerful than Thanos and his children combined,” he said haughtily, “and I will not tolerate being talked down to by a three-foot-tall child with what is honestly the worst dip-dye hairstyle I have ever seen in my extensively long existence.”

The three-foot-tall child grinned. “I would think a powerful god would brush off a mortal’s opinions without a thought,” she said. “But you obviously care what I think, don’t you?”

Loki didn’t grace the verbal jab with a response. “Do you want to know how my story ends, or not?”

Gamora shook her head, still smiling. “Fine. Continue. What happened once you got back to the ship? How did you survive Thanos and the Black Order?”

“Ah. That’s the best part.” Loki smirked, getting back into it. “Thanos and his Black Order never knew I was gone. Once I convinced the warlock—Stephen Strange, that is—to use the Time Stone—which was much more difficult than you’d think; my brother was fifteen minutes dead before I convinced Strange to turn time back and do it over again so that he’d survive—it was just a matter of viewing and sorting through as many potential futures as possible and figuring out which actions would lead to which consequences. Out of fourteen million possible futures, the wizard found one series of events resulting in a victory over Thanos. He explained everything to me, saying that he’d have to reverse time, effectively wiping his own memory of our meeting and his revelation about the key to our victory. Strange said that, once Thanos found the Soul Stone, Strange would use the Time Stone to dramatically slow down time within it. That would give those of us trapped inside time to get to my portal and escape before the Infinity Gauntlet dissolves, or explodes, or whatever will happen when its integrity collapses, possibly taking us all out with it.”

Gamora’s eyes widened. “I knew the Gauntlet was malfunctioning,” she said, “but I wasn’t sure what would happen if it failed.”

Loki shrugged. “Oh, nothing major. Just the end of the universe as we know it.” He smiled coyly. 

“Then we need to move faster.” Gamora picked up the pace, her little feet leaving faded marks in the gray sand and shimmering, viscous waves. “We’re running out of time.”

“Very, very slowly running out of time,” Loki reminded her, and she slowed back to a fast walk. 

“Oh,” she said. “Right.” 

“You asked earlier how I managed to escape Thanos,” Loki reminded her. “Do you still want to know?”

“Yes.” Gamora looked up at him, eyes slightly narrowed. “How did you?”

“The wizard put an enchantment on me.” Loki wrinkled up his nose at the memory. It hadn’t been his proudest or most comfortable moment, but it had been necessary. “It allowed me to remember everything we discussed even after he turned back time to the moment I arrived at the Sanctum. I then used the Space Stone to return to the ship, leaving Strange none the wiser. At that point, roughly fifteen seconds had passed since I departed. No one had noticed my absence; my illusions fooled the Black Order completely.” Loki hesitated, wondering how to effectively dramatize the next bit. The end of his story was a touching and tragic one, and he wanted to do it justice. “After visiting New York, I used the Space Stone to open a portal on the seventh level of the Soul Stone. Strange had told me its location, as well as the finer details of the weeks and months that would follow Thanos’s initial victory. In the fifteen seconds I was missing from the ship, I spent a full Earth-year inside the Soul Stone. I planted Projectors—powerful objects capable of projecting a soul back into the physical word—throughout this Realm. The Projectors will allow those of us trapped inside to communicate with allies on the outside. I don’t know if you’ve seen them around, but they’re about the size of a Dwarf’s fist, and glowing orange.”

Gamora shook her head. “I haven’t seen them,” she admitted.

“It doesn’t matter. You’re with me; you don’t need them.” Loki held his head up, lengthening his stride slightly. “Anyway, once the Projectors were in place, I returned to the ship. Thanos took the Space Stone, but he was too late. Already, my plan was in full effect. In fact, him taking the stone was a big part of it.” Loki smirked at the memory of adrenaline and rushing, heart-thudding power that had accompanied that first moment of victory. “Thanos believed he’d defeated us. To stop him from killing my brother, I pretended to offer fealty to him and his cause. Knowing that he would sense a trap and attempt to kill me, I stood back in the shadows, using illusion magic on the body of a similarly-shaped and already-deceased Asgardian man. Thanos, caught up in the moment and in the rush of his new power, did not see through my illusion. He strangled the life from a dead man’s body, then tossed it aside, thinking he had killed me once and for all. And then, knowing Thanos would realize his mistake eventually, I returned to the portal I’d opened at the far end of the ship and stepped through into the Soul Realm moments before Thanos took full control of the Space Stone, causing the portal to close behind me. I’m not sure how fast the illusions on the corpse wore off after that, but it’s very possible—probable, even, given his rather limited intelligence—that my brother thinks I’m dead. Which wasn’t my intention, but it might be for the best. He’s a terrible secret-keeper, and an even worse liar.” 

Gamora stared up at him with the intensity of a hunting falcon as he finished his tale. “It was a good plan,” she said. Her tone took on a hint of grudging respect. “Thanos still doesn’t know you beat him. If he’d suspected you were still alive, I’m sure I would’ve heard about it.”

Loki smiled, satisfied. “Thanos considers himself invincible. God-like. But he’s not a god, and he never will be. He’s mortal, and his plans are as weak and short-lived as mortal plans usually are. His limited understanding of the immense power he wields will be his undoing.”

Gamora nodded. “Thank you,” she said after a moment, “for giving me this chance.”

“From what I’ve heard,” Loki replied, “you have the best claim on Thanos’s life. You and your sister, who I would very much like to meet.”

There was another long moment of silence. “When we reach the sixth level, what’ll be waiting for us there?” Gamora asked.

“The Soul Stone will defend itself,” Loki explained. “To put it crudely, you’re like bacteria crawling into an infected cut. Hallucinations, recreations of painful memories, psychosis, confusion, and madness wait above. The Soul Stone is, for all intents and purposes, sentient. It is the most powerful of the Infinity Stones; its excess power comes from trapped souls. It won’t easily give up that power.”

Loki watched out of the corner of his eye as Gamora threw back her shoulders, lifted her chin, and set her jaw. “I’ll face anything,” she said, her voice low and dangerous, “to kill that monster for what he’s done.”

“Hold onto that anger,” Loki told her. “Revenge is a powerful motivator. It can raze cities to the ground and bring armies to their knees.”

“Revenge is powerful,” Gamora echoed, “but love is stronger. It is my love for my sister, for Peter Quill, and for the family I’ve made that will be Thanos’s undoing. When I kill him, and I _will_ kill him, I want the last thing he sees to be my face. I want him to look in my eyes and see how much I can love, to see the depth of that feeling, and to know the truth. To know that I could have loved him, that I was capable of it all along. And to realize that I never did.” 

Loki looked at her for a long, contemplative moment. “I can’t tell you how this ends,” he said. “But I promise you do play a significant part in killing Thanos. Hopefully that’s enough to convince you to fight your way past the Stone’s defenses and return to the realm of the living.”

“I don’t need convincing.” Gamora’s face was set in an expression of dark, fierce determination. “I’ve been waiting all my life to be free. When this is over, I will be.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Loki stopped. He gestured to a faint, mist-shrouded object rising out of the gray plains ahead. “Because those are the stairs to hell.”

Gamora smiled grimly. She clenched her little hands into fists. Without a word or a glance back at Loki, she marched across the glistening, rippling plain toward the shrouded stairs.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope everyone had a great weekend! I ate ten pounds of cinnamon rolls, seven s'mores, several handful of chocolate chips, and an entire plate of my mother's legendary enchiladas, and then passed the fuck out on the couch at my parents' house for what felt like several days, so I was super productive. Anyway, hope y'all enjoyed this chapter! And a MASSIVE "thank you" to everyone who left comments and feedback on the previous chapter!! I really, really, REALLY appreciate the support. I know I've said it before, but the Marvel fandom is the fucking best! <3


	9. Ghost Cellphone

**Chapter Nine**

**Ghost Cellphone**

Wanda woke up immediately after disintegrating. Her body was stiff, but her mind was stronger than whatever magic held her down. She sat up, hands clenched into fists. Her breath came in quick, short bursts. As her eyes adjusted, she took in the vast, dull gray landscape. She blinked; the tears clinging to her lashes fell onto her cheeks. She wiped them away and pushed herself to her feet.

Beside her lay three others. She recognized T’Challa, King of Wakanda, and Sam Wilson, the Falcon. However, the third figure was unfamiliar—it looked like a creature out of Greek myth, some cross between an oak tree and a human boy. She stood staring down at the three silent, unmoving bodies for a long minute. And then she knelt beside Sam, the one she knew best, and shook him gently.

Sam’s eyes opened slowly. Wanda leaned back on her heels, giving him some space. “Sam,” she said, in the calmest voice she could muster, “can you hear me?”

Sam blinked. His eyes focused; he turned his head to look at her. “Wanda?” His voice was rough, gravelly. Confusion filled his expression, his eyes widening as they fixed on the endless gray-orange sky overhead.

Wanda nodded. “Here.” She held out a hand, and he took it. She pulled him upright; he stumbled, and she nested her shoulder under his arm to keep him standing. 

“What is this place?” Sam stood perfectly still as he took in their surroundings. Only his head moved. His eyes, when he looked down at Wanda, were full of shock. “What happened? Did we beat Thanos?”

Wanda’s eyes filled with tears. She used her free hand to wipe away the wetness. “No,” she whispered. “No, we didn’t.”

Sam’s expression hardened. “Then what _did_ happen? Where are we?” He gestured aimlessly at the sprawling, endless gray plains and dull, bloody sunset. 

Wanda shook her head. She covered her mouth with one hand, pressing her lips to her palm to keep her voice from shaking. Tears threatened, blurring her vision. She took a deep breath in, releasing it slowly. With her arm around Sam’s torso, steadying him, she knew he could feel her trembling. “I think,” she began, her voice as tentative as a baby bird learning to fly, “we’re _inside_ one of the Stones.” She wasn’t sure how she knew this, she just did. Her intuition was tied to the fate of the Stones, her power inexorably linked to them.

Sam was silent for a long moment. “You mean,” he said, speaking with measured intent, “that we’re _trapped_ in an _Infinity Stone?_ ”

Wanda nodded mutely. “Thanos killed half the world. All those souls—all _our_ souls—had to go somewhere.”

Sam blinked, taking another careful look around. “So this is the afterlife. I don’t know what I expected, but I guess I’d hoped it would be more exciting than a million miles of poorly-poured concrete and a mediocre sunset I could see in D.C.”

Wanda smiled slightly. She wiped her eyes again, trying hard not to think about what it meant that Vision wasn’t by her side. Despite what everyone had said, she knew Vision had a soul. She’d seen it in his eyes when he’d caressed her face, smiling gently down at her like she was everything in the world. 

“What’s up with them?” Sam jerked his head at T’Challa and the humanoid tree. “Why aren’t they awake?”

Wanda sighed. “I had to shake you awake,” she said. She slipped out from under Sam’s arm, sensing that he was steady enough on his own. She was right; he stayed stubbornly upright. “Maybe they need the same treatment.” She gestured to T’Challa. “I’ll try him first.”

“What about, uh, the tree?” Sam raised an eyebrow. He crossed his arms over his chest. Surprisingly, Wanda noticed, his Falcon suit was fully in-tact, wings and all. She could see the metal edges sticking out behind his shoulders. Thanos’s spell, or whatever it was, hadn’t just disintegrated living things, it seemed.

Wanda knelt beside T’Challa. “I’ll try him next,” she said, with a glance over her shoulder at the motionless, wooden-skinned creature.

Wanda reached out with her mind and her hand. T’Challa was dressed in the Black Panther suit; the material was oddly soft, yet ridged and metallic, when she touched his shoulder. “King T’Challa,” she said, in the same soft voice she’d used with Sam. “It’s Wanda Maximoff. Can you hear me?”

For a moment, T’Challa remained motionless. Wanda was about to shake him again when his eyes snapped open. In half a second, he was on his feet. He looked around, blinking in surprise. Then his shoulders fell, his expression relaxed, and he sighed. He dropped into a half-crouch, hands braced on his knees as he regained his strength after his initial burst of energy. “We lost the battle,” he said. “I don’t know this place, but I know what it means.” He looked up, meeting Wanda’s gaze directly. He was looking to her for confirmation, she realized.

Swallowing hard, she nodded. “Thanos got the Mind Stone,” she said. Her voice nearly broke; she cleared her throat, straightening her spine and lifting her chin. “He has all the Stones now. But that doesn’t make him indestructible.”

T’Challa’s expression shifted from resignation to determination in point-one second. “You think we can still beat him. How?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, uncrossing and re-crossing his arms. He fixed Wanda with a slightly skeptical look. “Look, I get that we’re dead. What I don’t get is how you expect to, I dunno, bust out of an Infinity Stone-grade soul-prison and kick that grimacing purple alien’s ass.”

Wanda shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said. “King T’Challa.” She turned to address the Wakandan ruler with a respectful tilt of her head. “You have much more battlefield experience than I do. And you, too, Sam,” she added, shooting him a small smile. “If anyone’s going to come up with a workable strategy for getting us out of here, it’ll be you two.”

“And what about you?” Sam made a broad gesture at the endless gray landscape. “You’re the one with the magic mind-powers. I think that counts for something, regardless of your lack of battlefield experience.” 

T’Challa turned toward the prone figure of the tree-man, still lying motionless on the gray plain. “Have you tried waking him?” he asked Wanda. “I saw him fight off dozens of the invading creatures at once. He could help us.”

Wanda approached the sleeping creature. She crouched beside him, reaching out hesitantly to touch his barky skin. “Hello,” she said softly. “My name’s Wanda. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The creature’s eyes opened. They were deep and dark, full of light and soul. The creature sat up, rubbing his eyes blearily. He looked around, then up at Wanda. “I am Groot?”

Wanda frowned. “Um… are you?” She looked back at T’Challa for confirmation; he shrugged one shoulder noncommittally. 

“I am _Groot_ ,” the tree-creature said, more forcefully this time. He pushed himself upright, stumbling and nearly falling. Immediately, a long, twisted root slid out of his hand to stabilize him. He looked around again, eyes wide, frowning.

“Groot,” Wanda said, with another glance back at Sam and T’Challa. “I’m Wanda. Do you know what happened?”

“I am Groot,” Groot said. He shrugged his narrow, branch-like shoulders. “I am Groot.”

Wanda bit her lip, unsure how to respond. She had the distinct, sinking feeling that Groot wasn’t going to say anything else. If that was the case, she would have to rely entirely on tone and inflection to understand what he was saying.

“Thanos won,” she told Groot. He turned to stare at her, his expression blank and his eyes full of sudden terror. “I think…” she swallowed hard, “…well, I think we’re dead. But it’s okay,” she added, when Groot’s eyes widened, and he stumbled again. Instinctively, she reached out to grip his shoulder. He didn’t flinch away from her touch. He looked up at her, silently beseeching her to explain how this could possibly be _okay._ “Thanos won this battle,” Wanda said, trying to sound as strong as her words, “but the war isn’t over. Not yet.”

Sam came up beside her. He laid a hand on her shoulder, squeezing once—a comforting gesture. “That’s right,” he said. “There’s still a chance we’ll kick Thanos’s ass, take back the Infinity Stones, and destroy them once and for all. Right, Wanda?”

A pit opened in Wanda’s stomach. She swallowed hard. “That’s right,” she agreed softly. She smiled at Groot, straightening up. “But first, we need to find the others. They have to be here; it can’t just be us.”

T’Challa lifted his head, looking out over the gray plains with a faraway look in his eyes. “You said Thanos destroyed half the world,” he said. “I’m sure many Wakandans fell in the culling. If I can find them, we can regroup and find a way out.”

“Okay then,” said Sam. “First order of business: find the others. See, everything is so much better when you have a plan. Even if it’s just one tiny piece of a not-super-viable plan.”

Wanda smiled. “True.” She turned in a circle, scoping out the flat, unending landscape. She reached out with her mind, her awareness spreading like a net over the gray plains. Closing her eyes, she focused all her energy on sensing the space around her. “This way,” she said, after a long moment. She pointed toward the brightest point on the horizon. “The way out is in that direction.”

Sam and T’Challa exchanged a somewhat wary glance. Groot looked at the horizon, then back at Wanda. With a shrug, the tree-creature started walking in the indicated direction.

“Alright, Wanda,” said Sam. “Whatever you say goes. But you better not lead us on an unnecessary twenty-mile hike and then realize it’s in the opposite direction. I don’t care if I’m dead; the blisters I get from these boots might literally kill me.”

“I can’t make any promises,” Wanda replied, “but I’ll try my best.”

Sam started walking after Groot. “That’s all I ask,” he said with a smile. 

T’Challa nodded. As he walked past Wanda, he paused to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Back on the battlefield, I saw what you’re capable of,” he said. “As long as we stand together, we are not defeated.”

Wanda smiled, blinking back a fresh wave of tears. “Thank you,” she whispered. “For everything.”

T’Challa returned the smile. “Of course,” he said. He began walking again, his regal silhouette wreathed in a dull orange glow.

. . . . . .

Nebula found Tony standing amid the wreckage of Thanos’s ship. It took her a moment to adjust to the glaring brightness of midmorning on Titan, but when she did, her heart launched into her throat and stuck, beating furiously.

It was Mantis. Not only Mantis, but Drax, Peter Quill, and the wizard from Earth. Tony, who seemed shaken but not in any immediate danger, appeared to be having a lively conversation with the wizard.

Nebula approached cautiously. She couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t hallucinating; maybe it was the heat, or something she’d eaten on the Guardians’ ship. She wouldn’t put it past them to lace their food with recreational drugs.

“Look, _Doctor,_ ” Tony was saying, gesturing animatedly at the wreckage, “I don’t exactly have the tools—mental or physical—to deal with this right now.”

“I already explained to you, it’s called a Projector.” The wizard—doctor?—crossed his arms over his chest, his expression caught between exasperation and determination. “It’s not complicated. Essentially, it allows souls to manifest physically in the living world. This one is acting as a bridge between the Soul Realm and Titan.” The wizard gestured to a large, glowing stone hovering in the middle of the wreckage. “The farther I get from it, the less connected I’ll be. See, if I move over here, then you can’t…” The wizard took ten steps away from the stone, his voice and physical form fading almost at once. He returned to the Projector, every step bringing him closer to full visibility. He laid a hand on the stone. “Point proven.”

“So it’s like a ghost cellphone,” said Tony. “If you move out of signal range, it cuts off your call.”

The wizard nodded, his expression thoughtful. “That’s… actually a pretty apt metaphor.”

Nebula leapt nimbly down into the clearing where the other were gathered. Unlike the wizard, Mantis, Quill, and Drax seemed unable to speak. Their mouths moved, but no sound came out. Their eyes seemed focused on something far away—it was like they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make sense of the world around them. Their bodies kept shimmering, adding to the mirage-like feeling. Nebula got the sense that, unlike the wizard, they weren’t entirely present in the land of the living. They had strayed much farther from the glowing stone; she guessed that had a lot to do with it.

Tony ran a hand over his face, turning to Nebula as she approached. “Good to see you,” he said. “I thought you might’ve taken their ship—” he gestured to the faded, wandering ghosts of the Guardians, “—and left me to fend for myself.”

Nebula frowned. “How do you know about the ship?”

Tony shrugged. “I dunno. They had to get here somehow.”

Nebula’s eyes narrowed. “I found water,” she said. “It’s back by the dry fountain.” 

She watched relief cross Tony’s face like light breaking through the clouds on a spring day. “Great,” he said. “Because Dr. Exposition here won’t tell me anything actually useful, and I’m starting to get a serious headache from listening to him.”

The wizard looked indignant. “If you don’t want my help,” he said, “then just say so. I have much more important things to do than stand around explaining things to you.”

“Important things like babysitting a bunch of useless aliens?” Tony raised an eyebrow skeptically. “Yeah, hard pass on listening to any more of your charming _explanations_. Just tell me the bare essentials of this plan of yours, and I’ll see what I can do.”

The wizard looked at Nebula, then back at Tony. “She’s about to offer you safe passage off Titan,” the wizard said. “Go with her. Take the Projector with you on the ship. Try not to damage it in any way—I’m not sure what would happen if you did.”

“Don’t crack the ghost cellphone, got it,” said Tony.

The wizard turned his attention to Nebula. “I’m not sure of Thanos’s location yet, but as soon as I find out, you’ll be the first to know.”

Nebula narrowed her eyes. “I’ve known Thanos all my life,” she said. “What makes you think you’ll find him before I can?”

The wizard half-smiled. “I have my ways,” he said. 

Nebula wasn’t convinced, but she nodded once, keeping her expression carefully blank. “I won’t stop until I find him,” she said. “And then I’ll kill him, no matter the cost.”

Tony and the wizard exchanged a quick glance. “Just wait ‘till I’m out of the blast radius before you go nuclear on him,” said Tony. “I’ve got like, a quarter of a working suit and a pile of rusty scraps to build a new one with.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” said the wizard. He took a step back from the stone, his form and voice fading. “Good luck, Stark. You’re gonna need it.” And then, with a dramatic swirl of his cloak, he and the Guardians disappeared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woohoo, it's Friday!! I'm super excited for the weekend, even though I have to write three (3) essays and one (1) short story before Monday. But after next week I'll be done with finals, so I'm psyched af for that! Hope everyone is having a great week, and (as always) a HUGE thank you to all the incredible people who left me feedback and comments on the previous chapter!! Y'all rock; I'm so thankful to be part of such an incredibly supportive and wonderful fandom! :,D


	10. The Silver Stairs

**Chapter Ten**

**The Silver Stairs**

Bucky followed the tracks across the gray sand. The farther he traveled, the more liquid the ground underfoot became; soon, he was wading through several inches of viscous silver goo that rippled and contorted at the slightest touch. Despite the deep sense of foreboding that settled over him like a heavy, wet blanket, he continued tracking the trail, still visible but faint beneath the liquid surface, as it curved away from the little stone structure and swept on toward the sun-less, yet ever-bright, horizon. 

An hour passed. Or maybe it was a minute; Bucky had lost all sense of time and direction in the endless gray expanse. He kept up a steady pace, feet striking the viscous silver liquid, spraying it behind him like a wake of melted metal. He began to notice, a little over an hour after finding the tracks, that each step felt heavier than the last. He slowed slightly, but the feeling of pressure refused to relent. It was as if some strong, invisible force was warning him back.

Gritting his teeth, he set his shoulders and continued with renewed purpose and determination. _Steve would be proud._ The thought brought a small smile to his face.

Just as time was beginning to fade into a single senseless blur, Bucky spotted a wall of mist ahead. He stopped, hesitating and assessing. It didn’t look dangerous, but he’d learned long ago that the most harmless appearances hid deadly motives. The mist looked calm, peaceful, drifting silently across the gray flats. But the longer he stood there, the thicker it got: it was as if it was rushing up to meet him, gathering itself into a living, moving creature of condensed air and water. 

“I can’t see anything up here!” A high, child-like voice drifted out of the thickening mist. “What if I step off the stairs?”

“Then I’ll catch you.” This voice was male, smooth and attractive and confident. Bucky thought he recognized it from somewhere. Like the fading edges of an all-but-forgotten dream, lingering in the shadows of his mind. “Just keep moving forward; don’t look behind.”

“I _can’t_ look behind,” the child replied, “without falling off the sides.”

“You knew this would be difficult,” the male voice said. “You have faced far more treacherous roads, have you not, Daughter of Thanos?”

“Call me that again,” the child snarled, “and I’ll throw you off these stairs, Son of Odin.” Bucky heard a note of something hard, polished, and precise in the tone: they weren’t a child’s words, despite the youthful voice that clad them. 

The male voice rose in a mischievous, satisfied laugh. “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “But technically, I’m a son of Laufey, not Odin. So unless your threat was meant for my brother—in which case, by all means, pursue it—then I’m afraid it’s fallen flat.” 

The girl huffed, and Bucky could almost hear her clench her fists. “I don’t care what you call yourself. Just don’t call me that again,” she repeated. And then there was silence between them for a long time.

Bucky moved cautiously toward the mist. The strange voices had come from within it, so it couldn’t be _that_ dangerous. Right?

Right. Anyway, he was already dead. What more could this strange place do to him?

He had a sneaking, horrible suspicion that the answer to that supposedly rhetorical question was: _a lot._

He reached the edge of the mist and stepped into it. It surrounded him, thick and heavy and stifling. He held his breath, moving silently through the silver cloud. Droplets of silver like the liquid beneath his feet gathered on his bare skin and stained his battered combat suit. They condensed in the joint of his metal arm and slid down to his fingers, following the neat golden grooves and lines of expert Wakandan craftsmanship. 

Moving toward the place where he thought the voices had come from, Bucky eventually came across the base of a steep ascending stairway. The mist parted momentarily, and there it was: a rail-less, treacherously narrow ascent crafted of what appeared to be glass or crystal, glinting in the eternal sunset creeping through the thinning mist. Bucky paused again at the base of the stair, trying to see where it led. The mist was thicker higher up, and he couldn’t see farther than a few feet—past the fifth stair, the path was a mystery to him.

He looked down. The trail he’d been following ended just before the bottom stair. Whoever it was he’d heard up there, they were the same people he’d been following. If he wanted to reach them, to find out if they knew where he was, what had happened, or how to escape (if that was even possible) from the unending wasteland he’d woken up in, he’d have to risk climbing these stairs. Taking a deep breath, he set his booted foot on the first stair, and began to climb.

He counted one hundred and fifty-three steps before his quarry came into view ahead. He moved swift and silent, the mist surrounding him like an assassin’s hooded cloak. Crouching low, he paused, assessing.

It was, as the tracks had suggested, a young girl and a tall man of maybe thirty-some years. Bucky watched them as they paused to rest, their backs to him as they stared up into the thick, unyielding mist. He thought about calling out, then reconsidered. He had no idea who these people were, or what their purpose was. What if they were guarding these stairs? What if they were in league with Thanos, and this was a trap or trick? No, he couldn’t risk it. He’d continue following at a distance until he knew more about them.

They climbed slowly. Two hundred steps. Three hundred steps. Four hundred, five hundred, six. The man and the child moved at a slow pace, the mist impeding their steady upward climb. Bucky followed a safe distance behind, always careful to stay out of sight.

Then, around stair number six hundred and seventy, Bucky looked down to check his footing for one brief moment and looked up to find the others gone. He froze, crouching low, all his senses straining for any sign of them. Nothing. After a long, tense minute, he realized they must’ve been swallowed up in the mist. The higher they got, the thicker the clouds became, making it increasingly difficult for him to move without detection. And, apparently, it also made it easier for him to lose track of his quarry.

Bucky straightened up and started up the stairs at a much faster pace. He skipped one, two at a time, feeling the rush and sting of adrenaline as his feet slid on the violent edges and slipped over the seemingly bottomless abyss beyond. He made it up forty-some stairs before he slowed for a moment.

And that’s when they grabbed him. 

The child came out of nowhere. She struck him behind the knee, flipping up from under the stairs to land behind him. Ahead, her tall male companion emerged from the mist, catching Bucky by the throat and swinging him out over the white, misty void. 

“Talk,” said the child in a dangerous voice. “Who are you? Why are you following us?”

The man holding Bucky smiled, and through the parting mist, Bucky finally recognized him. In a moment of horrified clarity, Bucky realized he wasn’t a man at all. “Barnes,” said Loki of Asgard, his voice calm but his fingers deadly-tight around Bucky’s throat. “How good to finally make your acquaintance.”

. . . . . .

The abyss yawned behind them, growing ever wider like the mouth of some enormous, ravenous beast. Peter, who could easily have outpaced it on his own, forced himself to stay with Aunt May as she struggled to keep ahead of the violent river of sand. Ned kept pace with Peter, his eyes wide with un-masked terror.

“Holy shit!” Ned yelled as a second, smaller crack opened a mere inch from where he’d stood moments before. He dodged it as it spread, leaping over a smaller offshoot of splitting lines. “We’re gonna die! We’re totally gonna die!”

“We’re gonna be fine!” Peter yelled, ignoring the frantic racing of his heart. “We’re gonna be fine, Ned!”

“Both of you, shut up!” Aunt May gasped, “and keep running!”

If it weren’t for the fact that they no longer needed to breathe, all three of them would’ve been overwhelmed and swept into the black, bottomless void immediately. As it were, they managed to stay just ahead, leaping crevasses and dodging sinkholes. The sand hissed and slid like silver snakes around their ankles, filling their shoes and sticking to their clothes. To Peter, it seemed that the harder they ran, the faster the crack grew. Eventually, unless they found some way to escape it, they would run out of time.

“This is it!” Ned screeched as he tripped over another small crack and nearly went sprawling. “I don’t wanna die… well, I don’t wanna die _again!”_

“We won’t!” Peter said. He was only comfortable saying this because he was pretty sure it was scientifically impossible (or at least highly improbable) for any person to die multiple times. Then again, the rules of the universe had grown fuzzy in the past couple years. Maybe death wasn’t as permanent or final as he’d once thought. (He really, really hoped it wasn’t.)

Despite their best efforts, the abyss grew too fast and wide for them to get away. The sand blew into their faces and sucked at their feet. The air grew thick with clouds of silver dust, obscuring their vision and making it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead.

Aunt May was the first to fall. Ned followed directly after. Peter didn’t even hesitate before turning and plunging down after them—if they were going down, he was going down with them. It wasn’t even a choice. 

As they fell into the void, their screams mingling in the dusty air, Peter caught a flash of bright red high above. It swirled down toward him, twisting and contorting like a rag being wrung. And then Peter flipped over midair, the wind catching him like a kite with no string, and he could see nothing but the eternal darkness below. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been ages since the last chapter, I KNOOOW. I'm sorry I haven't written much this summer, but life has been C-R-A-Z-Y lately! For any of you who follow me on Tumblr, you've probably heard about my mom's broken collarbone, my sister's oral surgery, my dog's ten million veterinary appointments, my cousins coming to stay with me at my parents' house (the problem: too many people, not enough house) and my recent (as in, two days ago) diagnosis with generalized anxiety disorder and Bipolar Type II. So! It's been Quite The Summer. But I finally forced myself to sit down and write a (somewhat short) chapter for this story, because I miss these characters and I really want to finish this fic before I die of old age. *ahem* 
> 
> Anyway, thank you SO MUCH to everyone who's left a comment on this story or supported me and/or my writing in any way. I appreciate each and every one of you so very, very much; you keep me going! Hope everyone's had a fantastic summer. :)


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